In a new decision released on Friday, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Department of State v. Munoz that a citizen does not have a “fundamental liberty interest” in whether or not a noncitizen spouse is admitted into the country. The decision comes a week after President Joe Biden issued an executive order granting a pathway to citizenship to illegal immigrant spouses of American citizens.
Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Sandra Munoz brought the case after she married Luis Asencio-Cordero, an illegal immigrant, in 2010 and named him as her immediate relative a few years later. In 2015, her husband left the country to apply for a visa in El Salvador, but consular officers denied him at the American embassy due to suspicion that he was affiliated with the violent international gang MS-13.
In the majority opinion, Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that Munoz didn’t have a fundamental right for her husband to be admitted to the country. “Munoz’s claim to a procedural due process right in someone else’s legal proceeding would have unsettling collateral consequences. Her position would usher in a new strain of constitutional law—one that prevents the government from taking actions that ‘indirectly or incidentally’ burden a citizen’s legal rights,” the court’s opinion states.
“She reasons as follows: The right to live with her noncitizen spouse in the United States is implicit in the ‘liberty’ protected by the Fifth Amendment; the denial of her husband’s visa deprived her of this interest, thereby triggering her right to due process; the consular officer violated her right to due process by declining to disclose the basis for finding Asencio-Cordero inadmissible; and this, in turn, enables judicial review, even though visa denials are ordinarily unreviewable by courts,” the court’s opinion states. “Munoz’s argument fails at the threshold. Her argument is built on the premise that the right to bring her noncitizen spouse to the United States is an unenumerated constitutional right. To establish this premise, she must show that the asserted right is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.'”
The ruling comes a week after President Biden issued an executive order that granted a pathway to legal status for noncitizen spouses, prompting some to speculate that the order was an attempt to supersede the Supreme Court ruling.
“Is there a new leaker at the Supreme Court? Just days ago, the Biden regime announced a radical new executive order to legalize the immigrant spouses of citizens, even if those immigrants were in the U.S. to commit crimes or were here legally. It was very strange timing for such an oddly specific EO,” the CEO of the Federalist, Sean Davis, wrote. “Somebody at the White House was clearly tipped off about the unannounced Supreme Court decision, which explains why the White House rushed out such a shoddily written and argued new executive order to open the border even more: the Biden regime knew how the Supreme Court was going to rule, and it sought to pre-empt the court with its absurd EO.”