I’m having a stupid argument that I hope someone can help me with.
An acquaintance proposes that certain criminals be deported. I of course state that you can’t deport natural born U.S. citizens. (lets leave out the denaturalization process for foreign born citizens) I use the 14th amendment as my cite. The 14th does not specifically say “You can’t deport citizens.” Is there specific case law that states that US citizens can’t be deported? Trump seems to have broken google since most searches on the subject of deportation link to articles about him. The few that I’ve found that seem to answer the question basically say “Of course you can’t deport citizens” without giving any cites.
Interesting question. There’s case law that says that you can’t strip US citizens of their citizenship without establishing via a “preponderance of the evidence” that it was a citizen’s intent to renounce their US citizenship: Vance v. Terrazas (1980). This would mean that it would be difficult to strip said criminals of their citizenship.
So if you’re going to try to impose such a law, you’re probably going to have to bar U.S. citizens from entering the U.S. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find is any clear case law that says that U.S. citizens abroad have an automatic right to return to the United States. There are several Cold-War-era cases involving the government trying to revoke people’s passports due to communist connections, but most of these involved people citizens who were initially in the United States and wanted to travel abroad, rather than cases in which a citizen was “trapped outside” the U.S. I look forward to seeing what other folks have to say about this.
No other country would accept them. If they actually have a US passport, they cannot be stopped. I don’t have a cite for this, but I think the passport says so.
A friend of mine once entered the US with an expired passport. He was admitted, but charged a $50 “processing fee” (explicitly not a fine). This was a few decades ago when $50 was significant.
That is a key point: to deport someone means that there is a country willing to accept them. If they’re only a US citizen, no other country has any obligation to take them.
I’m not saying the guy had a good legal argument but he is saying to dump violent criminals in Afghanistan or the contested parts of Iraq. Obviously it would be against the laws of those countries but they would have little ability to stop it. There is no question about the stupidity of that part of his argument or the legality of it but we certainly have the military resources to do it and those countries lack the capability to do anything but protest.
Beyond that I’m still curious if there was case law about kicking citizens out of the country. Call it deportation or exile. Is it just a given or has it ever been explored?
(internal citations mostly deleted, bolding emphasis is mine)
TLDR version…
A person claiming citizenship who has been arrested and subjected to deportation proceedings has the right to file a writ of habeus corpus, and upon the presentation of supporting evidence to a claim of citizenship has the right to be released pending the outcome of the immigration proceedings.
The court referenced denial of liberty and property interests in its decision.
Canada proposed a similar course of action. The previous Prime Minster, Stephen harper, had a Trump-like bee in his bonnet about terrorists; he proposed a law that prompted a great deal of outrage, that citizens who were also citizens of another country could be stripped of citizenship and deported if guilty of terrorist charges.
Since I have a UK passport too, does this mean if I donated to the wrong charity I could be stripped of my Canadian citizenship and deported to England - despite never having lived anywhere else and being born in Canada 60 years ago? (A number of charities have been accused of being fronts to support various terror groups; IIRC, Cat Stevens was at one time placed on the US no-fly list for allegedly donating to the wrong Muslim Charity).
The commentary in the news was that this created a two-tier citizenship, those who could be “stripped and deported” and those who could not. Of course, our citizenship rights in Canada are not so clearly protected by constitutional right as are US citizens. As pointed out by others, you need to find someone who will take a deportee before you can deport them. Generally, countries don’t want someone else’s garbage, and there aren’t really any Australias left.
You can also point to the case of Ivan Demjanjuk, who was accused of being Ivan the Terrible, a prison guard in a concentration camp; he was stripped of his citizenship in his 80s and deported from the USA. In Israel, he was acquitted because it was impossible to determine after so long if he was or was not Ivan the Terrible; and there was sufficient doubt. (Of course, he ended up in Germany, where they went straight to convicting him on the basis of his simply being there, rather than whether he personally committed any atrocities.)
Tech pro-tip: I think you can do a google search for, e.g., deportation -Trump (note the minus sign before Trump) to find cites with the word “deportation” that don’t also mention Trump.
It’s pretty fundamental to the concept of “citizenship” that it includes the right to be in the territory of which you are a citizen. My guess would be that if the US were to try such a thing, the Supreme Court would find it to be somehow repugnant to the Constitution, since it seems like a fairly clear attempt to deprive people of the benefits of the citizenship clause.
The other point, of course, is that such an action would devalue the benefits of US citizenship generally, not just for the citizens actually deported. Other countries would attach less significance to, and take less comfort from, the fact that a visitor possess US citizenship since, if it turned out that the visitor was highly undesirable, there would be no guarantee that he could be returned to the US - the US might refuse to take him.
So, yeah, I’m guessing that this would be unconstitutional, and I’m certain that it would be offensive and unwise.
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” - Robert Frost
Notably, the slippery slope she predicted does not seem to have happened.
The case law is likely to involve discussions as to when citizenship may be stripped from naturalized citizens. I’m guessing that attempts to deport people who were citizens from birth simply haven’t happened much.
I agree with all of that and agree that the Supreme Court would rule that it is unconstitutional. That was basically my question. Has the Supreme Court ever ruled on such a case? It doesn’t appear to have happened most likely because a natural born citizen has never been deported.
And I specifically stated in the OP to leave out the denaturalization process because that’s a completely different issue. There are several specific ways written into the law in which a foreign born naturalized citizen can be stripped of their citizenship such as obtaining it fraudulently or being a terrorist. I was talking specifically about citizens born here. Of course Trump believes just being born here doesn’t give you citizenship and he knows many top lawyers who agree with him.
It’s happened many times, sometimes more than once to the same person. It’s happened enough to garner the attention of civil liberties groups.
And yes, the Supreme Court has weighed in on the matter. And their ruling was that a person presenting a claim of citizenship has the right to have the matter adjudicated in court and the right to file for a Writ of Habeus Corpus. Upon successful ruling from the judge the individual is released.
Most deportation hearings are not before a judge but rather are a civil matter before a immigration commissioner.
Though it is not well settled the exact meaning of the phrase “natural born citizen” one common definition is acquiring citizenship at birth either through birth on American soil or by birth to an American parent abroad while meeting certain legal requirements. The second case is exactly what applied to Gin Sang Get and Gin Sang Mo in their Supreme Court case.
The US government tried to deport them. The case rose to the Supreme Court. And the court ordered that they had a right to file a writ of habeus corpus and present evidence of their citizenship in court.
The court ruled the complainants had this right because the executive only has jurisdiction to deport aliens (non-citizens). Ergo, the executive (Immigration) does NOT have the right to deport citizens. And persons making a claim of citizenship have a right to challenge such deportation actions in court.
Jacqueline Stevens writes (pdf link) on the topic of deportation of Americans through the Deportation Clinic at Northwestern University.
Think of it like an arrest of an innocent person. Sure, we don’t WANT that to happen, but it does. Can police arrest someone who is factually innocent? Yes, of course. Could a court set a bond before a factually innocent person could be released to later face charges for which there is probable cause. Yes, of course. And could such a factually innocent person not be able to make bail and end up spending time in jail awaiting trial. Yes, of course. But they get their day in court.
The reality is that some American citizens are swept up in immigration raids or refused entry at the border. But this is not a criminal proceeding. What the SCOTUS has ruled is that persons making such a claim are entitled to a COURT (read as NOT an EOIRadministrative) hearing. But some citizens, even natural born citizens, have opted to agree to a “voluntary” deportation rather than wait in immigration detention for a court date. That method of gaining freedom often comes back to bite them later when they show up as a previous deported alien on ICE’s database.
The cases of Mark Lyttle, Guillermo Olivares, Pedro Guzman, and Cynthia Trevino are instructive about how difficult it can be for citizens suspected of being aliens.
Emma Goldman was married and then divorced very early in life to a Jacob Kershner. As far as I could tell looking over various web sites, she never married Berkman?