Source: http://1lawyer.org/lynch-atty-gen-v-morales-santana-luis-r-decided-06122017/
Timestamp: 2017-06-26 22:25:26
Document Index: 467111596

Matched Legal Cases: ['§1401', '§1409', '§1401', '§1409', '§1401', '§1401', '§1401', '§1401', '§1401', '§1401', '§1409', '§1401', '§1401', '§1409', '§1402', '§1401', '§1409', '§1409', '§1409', '§2', '§37', '§1409', '§1409', '§1409', '§1401', '§1409', '§1409', '§1409', '§1409', '§1409', '§1401', '§1409', '§1401']

LYNCH, ATT’Y GEN. v. MORALES-SANTANA, LUIS R.. Decided 06/12/2017 | 1 Lawyers
LYNCH, ATT’Y GEN. v. MORALES-SANTANA, LUIS R.. Decided 06/12/2017
Syllabus SESSIONS v. MORALES-SANTANA ( ) 804 F. 3d 520, affirmed in part, reversed in part, and remanded.
The respondent in this case, Luis Ramón Morales-Santana, was born in the Dominican Republic when his father was just 20 days short of meeting §1401(a)(7)’s physical-presence requirement. Opposing removal to the Dominican Republic, Morales-Santana asserts that the equal protection principle implicit in the Fifth Amendment 1 entitles him to citizenship stature. We hold that the gender line Congress drew is incompatible with the requirement that the Government accord to all persons “the equal protection of the laws.” Nevertheless, we cannot convert §1409(c)’s exception for unwed mothers into the main rule displacing §1401(a)(7) (covering married couples) and §1409(a) (covering unwed fathers). We must therefore leave it to Congress to select, going forward, a physical-presence requirement (ten years, one year, or some other period) uniformly applicable to all children born abroad with one U. S.-citizen and one alien parent, wed or unwed. In the interim, the Government must ensure that the laws in question are administered in a manner free from gender-based discrimination.
235–236. Section 1401 sets forth the INA’s rules for determining who “shall be nationals and citizens of the United States at birth” by establishing a range of residency and physical-presence requirements calibrated primarily to the parents’ nationality and the child’s place of birth. §1401(a) (1958 ed.); §1401 (2012 ed.). The primacy of §1401 in the statutory scheme is evident. Comprehensive in coverage, §1401 provides the general framework for the acquisition of citizenship at birth. In particular, at the time relevant here, 2 §1401(a)(7) provided for the U. S. citizenship of
Congress has since reduced the duration requirement to five years, two after age 14. §1401(g) (2012 ed.). 3 Section 1409 pertains specifically to children with unmarried parents. Its first subsection, §1409(a), incorporates by reference the physical-presence requirements of §1401, thereby allowing an acknowledged unwed citizen parent to transmit U. S. citizenship to a foreign-born child under the same terms as a married citizen parent. Section 1409(c)—a provision applicable only to unwed U. S.-citizen mothers—states an exception to the physical-presence requirements of §§1401 and 1409(a). Under §1409(c)’s exception, only one year of continuous physical presence is required before unwed mothers may pass citizenship to their children born abroad.
8 U. S. C. §1402). After living in Puerto Rico for nearly two decades, José left his childhood home on February 27, 1919, 20 days short of his 19th birthday, therefore failing to satisfy §1401(a)(7)’s requirement of five years’ physical presence after age 14. Record 57, 66. He did so to take up employment as a builder-mechanic for a U. S. company in the then-U. S.-occupied Dominican Republic. Ibid. 4 By 1959, José attested in a June 21, 1971 affidavit presented to the U. S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, he was living with Yrma Santana Montilla, a Dominican woman he would eventually marry. Id., at 57. In 1962, Yrma gave birth to their child, respondent Luis Morales-Santana. Id., at 166–167. While the record before us reveals little about Morales-Santana’s childhood, the Dominican archives disclose that Yrma and José married in 1970, and that José was then added to Morales-Santana’s birth certificate as his father. Id., at 163–164, 167. José also related in the same affidavit that he was then saving money “for the susten[ance] of [his] family” in anticipation of undergoing surgery in Puerto Rico, where members of his family still resided. Id., at 57. In 1975, when Morales-Santana was 13, he moved to Puerto Rico, id., at 368, and by 1976, the year his father died, he was attending public school in the Bronx, a New York City borough, id., at 140, 369. 5 C
564 U. S. 210 (2011) ( per curiam). Taking up Morales-Santana’s request for review, 579 U. S. ___ (2016), we consider the matter anew.
Because §1409 treats sons and daughters alike, Morales-Santana does not suffer discrimination on the basis of his gender. He complains, instead, of gender-based discrimination against his father, who was unwed at the time of Morales-Santana’s birth and was not accorded the right an unwed U. S.-citizen mother would have to transmit citizenship to her child. Although the Government does not contend otherwise, we briefly explain why Morales-Santana may seek to vindicate his father’s right to the equal protection of the laws. 6 Ordinarily, a party “must assert his own legal rights” and “cannot rest his claim to relief on the legal rights . . . of third parties.” Warth v. Seldin,
543 U. S. 125, 130 (2004) (quoting Powers v. Ohio,
523 U. S. 420, 450 (1998) (O’Connor, J., concurring in judgment), for José died in 1976, Record 140, many years before the current controversy arose. See Hodel v. Irving,
481 U. S. 704–712, 723, n. 7 (1987) (children and their guardians may assert Fifth Amendment rights of deceased relatives). Morales-Santana is thus the “obvious claimant,” see Craig v. Boren,
429 U. S. 190, 197 (1976)
428 U. S. 106, 116 (1976)
368 U. S. 57, 62 (1961) (women are the “center of home and family life,” therefore they can be “relieved from the civic duty of jury service”); Goesaert v. Cleary,
335 U. S. 464, 466 (1948) (States may draw “a sharp line between the sexes”). Today, laws of this kind are subject to review under the heightened scrutiny that now attends “all gender-based classifications.” J. E. B. v. Alabama ex rel. T. B.,
511 U. S. 127, 136 (1994)
443 U. S. 76, 84 (1979)
404 U. S. 71–77 (1971) (holding unconstitutional a probate-code preference for a father over a mother as administrator of a deceased child’s estate). 7 Prescribing one rule for mothers, another for fathers, §1409 is of the same genre as the classifications we declared unconstitutional in Reed, Frontiero, Wiesenfeld, Goldfarb, and Westcott. As in those cases, heightened scrutiny is in order. Successful defense of legislation that differentiates on the basis of gender, we have reiterated, requires an “exceedingly persuasive justification.” Virginia, 518 U. S., at 531 (internal quotation marks omitted); Kirchberg v. Feenstra,
450 U. S. 455, 461 (1981) (internal quotation marks omitted).
533 U. S. 53, 60, 70 (2001)
1139–1140, §1409 ended a century and a half of congressional silence on the citizenship of children born abroad to unwed parents. 8 During this era, two once habitual, but now untenable, assumptions pervaded our Nation’s citizenship laws and underpinned judicial and administrative rulings: In marriage, husband is dominant, wife subordinate; unwed mother is the natural and sole guardian of a nonmarital child.
239 U. S. 299, 311 (1915)
. 9 See generally Brief for Professors of History et al. as Amici Curiae 4–15. Through the early 20th century, a male citizen automatically conferred U. S. citizenship on his alien wife. Act of Feb. 10, 1855, ch. 71, §2,
604; see Kelly v. Owen, 7 Wall. 496, 498 (1869) (the 1855 Act “confers the privileges of citizenship upon women married to citizens of the United States”); C. Bredbenner, A Nationality of Her Own:Women, Marriage, and the Law of Citizenship 15–16, 20–21 (1998). A female citizen, however, was incapable of conferring citizenship on her husband; indeed, she was subject to expatriation if she married an alien. 10 The family of a citizen or a lawfully admitted permanent resident enjoyed statutory exemptions from entry requirements, but only if the citizen or resident was male. See, e.g., Act of Mar. 3, 1903, ch. 1012, §37,
1221 (wives and children entering the country to join permanent-resident aliens and found to have contracted contagious diseases during transit shall not be deported if the diseases were easily curable or did not present a danger to others); S. Rep. No. 1515, 81st Cong., 2d Sess., 415–417 (1950) (wives exempt from literacy and quota requirements). And from 1790 until 1934, the foreign-born child of a married couple gained U. S. citizenship only through the father. 11 For unwed parents, the father-controls tradition never held sway. Instead, the mother was regarded as the child’s natural and sole guardian. At common law, the mother, and only the mother, was “bound to maintain [a nonmarital child] as its natural guardian.” 2 J. Kent, Commentaries on American Law *215–*216 (8th ed. 1854); see Nguyen, 533 U. S., at 91–92 (O’Connor, J., dissenting). In line with that understanding, in the early 20th century, the State Department sometimes permitted unwed mothers to pass citizenship to their children, despite the absence of any statutory authority for the practice. See Hearings on H. R. 6127 before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 76th Cong., 1st Sess., 43, 431 (1940) (hereinafter 1940 Hearings); 39 Op. Atty. Gen. 397, 397–398 (1939); 39 Op. Atty. Gen. 290, 291 (1939). See also Collins, Illegitimate Borders: Jus Sanguinis Citizenship and the Legal Construction of Family, Race, and Nation, 123 Yale L. J. 2134, 2199–2205 (2014) (hereinafter Collins).
441 U. S. 380, 382, 394 (1979)
. 12 Overbroad generalizations of that order, the Court has come to comprehend, have a constraining impact, descriptive though they may be of the way many people still order their lives. 13 Laws according or denying benefits in reliance on “[s]tereotypes about women’s domestic roles,” the Court has observed, may “creat[e] a self-fulfilling cycle of discrimination that force[s] women to continue to assume the role of primary family caregiver.” Nevada Dept. of Human Resources v. Hibbs,
538 U. S. 721, 736 (2003)
The 1952 Act provision at issue in Fiallo gave special immigration preferences to alien children of citizen (or lawful-permanent-resident) mothers, and to alien unwed mothers of citizen (or lawful-permanent-resident) children. 430 U. S., at 788–789, and n. 1. Unwed fathers and their children, asserting their right to equal protection, sought the same preferences. Id., at 791. Applying minimal scrutiny (rational-basis review), the Court upheld the provision, relying on Congress’ “exceptionally broad power” to admit or exclude aliens. Id., at 792, 794. 14 This case, however, involves no entry preference for aliens. Morales-Santana claims he is, and since birth has been, a U. S. citizen. Examining a claim of that order, the Court has not disclaimed, as it did in Fiallo, the application of an exacting standard of review. See Nguyen, 533 U. S., at 60–61, 70; Miller, 523 U. S., at 434–435, n. 11 (opinion of Stevens, J.).
The provision challenged in Miller and Nguyen as violative of equal protection requires unwed U. S.-citizen fathers, but not mothers, to formally acknowledge parenthood of their foreign-born children in order to transmit their U. S. citizenship to those children. See §1409(a)(4) (2012 ed.). 15 After Miller produced no opinion for the Court, see 523 U. S., at 423, we took up the issue anew in Nguyen. There, the Court held that imposing a paternal-acknowledgment requirement on fathers was a justifiable, easily met means of ensuring the existence of a biological parent-child relationship, which the mother establishes by giving birth. See 533 U. S., at 62–63. Morales-Santana’s challenge does not renew the contest over §1409’s paternal-acknowledgment requirement (whether the current version or that in effect in 1970), and the Government does not dispute that Morales-Santana’s father, by marrying Morales-Santana’s mother, satisfied that requirement.
We take up first the Government’s assertion that §1409(a) and (c)’s gender-based differential ensures that a child born abroad has a connection to the United States of sufficient strength to warrant conferral of citizenship at birth. The Government does not contend, nor could it, that unmarried men take more time to absorb U. S. values than unmarried women do. See supra, at 16. Instead, it presents a novel argument, one it did not advance in Flores-Villar. 16 An unwed mother, the Government urges, is the child’s only “legally recognized” parent at the time of childbirth. Brief for Petitioner 9–10, 28–32. 17 An unwed citizen father enters the scene later, as a second parent. A longer physical connection to the United States is warranted for the unwed father, the Government maintains, because of the “competing national influence” of the alien mother. Id., at 9–10. Congress, the Government suggests, designed the statute to bracket an unwed U. S.-citizen mother with a married couple in which both parents are U. S. citizens, 18 and to align an unwed U. S.-citizen father with a married couple, one spouse a citizen, the other, an alien.
Accepting, arguendo, that Congress intended the diverse physical-presence prescriptions to serve an interest in ensuring a connection between the foreign-born nonmarital child and the United States, the gender-based means scarcely serve the posited end. The scheme permits the transmission of citizenship to children who have no tie to the United States so long as their mother was a U. S. citizen continuously present in the United States for one year at any point in her life prior to the child’s birth. The transmission holds even if the mother marries the child’s alien father immediately after the child’s birth and never returns with the child to the United States. At the same time, the legislation precludes citizenship transmission by a U. S.-citizen father who falls a few days short of meeting §1401(a)(7)’s longer physical-presence requirements, even if the father acknowledges paternity on the day of the child’s birth and raises the child in the United States. 19 One cannot see in this driven-by-gender scheme the close means-end fit required to survive heightened scrutiny. See, e.g., Wengler v. Druggists Mut. Ins. Co.,
As the Court of Appeals pointed out, with one exception, 20 nothing in the congressional hearings and reports on the 1940 and 1952 Acts “refer[s] to the problem of statelessness for children born abroad.” 804 F. 3d, at 532–533. See Collins 2205, n. 283 (author examined “many hundreds of pre-1940 administrative memos . . . defend[ing] or explain[ing] recognition of the nonmarital foreign-born children of American mothers as citizens”; of the hundreds, “exactly one memo by a U. S. official . . . mentions the risk of statelessness for the foreign-born nonmarital children of American mothers as a concern”). Reducing the incidence of statelessness was the express goal of other sections of the 1940 Act. See 1940 Hearings 430 (“stateless[ness]” is “object” of section on foundlings). The justification for §1409’s gender-based dichotomy, however, was not the child’s plight, it was the mother’s role as the “natural guardian” of a nonmarital child. See supra, at 9–13; Collins 2205 (“[T]he pronounced gender asymmetry of the Nationality Act’s treatment of nonmarital foreign-born children of American mothers and fathers was shaped by contemporary maternalist norms regarding the mother’s relationship with her nonmarital child—and the father’s lack of such a relationship.”). It will not do to “hypothesiz[e] or inven[t]” governmental purposes for gender classifications “post hoc in response to litigation.” Virginia, 518 U. S., at 533, 535–536.
In sum, the Government has advanced no “exceedingly persuasive” justification for §1409(a) and (c)’s gender-specific residency and age criteria. Those disparate criteria, we hold, cannot withstand inspection under a Constitution that requires the Government to respect the equal dignity and stature of its male and female citizens. 21 IV
398 U. S. 333, 361 (1970) (Harlan, J., concurringin result)), when a statute benefits one class (in this case, unwed mothers and their children), as §1409(c) does, and excludes another from the benefit (here, unwed fathers and their children). “[A] court may either declare [the statute] a nullity and order that its benefits not extend to the class that the legislature intended to benefit, or it may extend the coverage of the statute to include those who are aggrieved by exclusion.” Westcott, 443 U. S., at 89 (quoting Welsh, 398 U. S., at 361 (opinion of Harlan, J.)). 22 “[W]hen the ‘right invoked is that to equal treatment,’ the appropriate remedy is a mandate of equal treatment, a result that can be accomplished by withdrawal of benefits from the favored class as well as by extension of benefits to the excluded class.” Heckler v. Mathews,
465 U. S. 728, 740 (1984) (quoting Iowa-Des Moines Nat. Bank v. Bennett,
284 U. S. 239, 247 (1931)
560 U. S. 413–427 (2010). 23 The choice between these outcomes is governed by the legislature’s intent, as revealed by the statute at hand. See id., at 427 (“On finding unlawful discrimination, . . . courts may attempt, within the bounds of their institutional competence, to implement what the legislature would have willed had it been apprised of the constitutional infirmity.”). See also Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood of Northern New Eng.,
546 U. S. 320, 330 (2006) (“the touchstone for any decision about remedy is legislative intent”). 24 Ordinarily, we have reiterated, “extension, rather than nullification, is the proper course.” Westcott, 443 U. S., at 89. Illustratively, in a series of cases involving federal financial assistance benefits, the Court struck discriminatory exceptions denying benefits to discrete groups, which meant benefits previously denied were extended. See, e.g., Goldfarb, 430 U. S., at 202–204, 213–217 (plurality opinion) (survivors’ benefits), aff’g 396 F. Supp. 308, 309 (EDNY 1975) (per curiam); Jimenez v. Weinberger,
401 U. S. 815, 834 (1971)
274 U. S. 657–666 (1927) (Congress “attached more importance to actual residence in the United States as indicating a basis for citizenship than it did to descent. . . . [T]he heritable blood of citizenship was thus associated unmistakeably with residence within the country which was thus recognized as essential to full citizenship.” (internal quotation marks omitted)). And the potential for “disruption of the statutory scheme” is large. For if §1409(c)’s one-year dispensation were extended to unwed citizen fathers, would it not be irrational to retain the longer term when the U. S.-citizen parent is married? Disadvantageous treatment of marital children in comparison to nonmarital children is scarcely a purpose one can sensibly attribute to Congress. 25 Although extension of benefits is customary in federal benefit cases, see supra, at 23–24, n. 22, 25, all indicators in this case point in the opposite direction. 26 Put to the choice, Congress, we believe, would have abrogated §1409(c)’s exception, preferring preservation of the general rule. 27 V
The gender-based distinction infecting §§1401(a)(7) and 1409(a) and (c), we hold, violates the equal protection principle, as the Court of Appeals correctly ruled. For the reasons stated, however, we must adopt the remedial course Congress likely would have chosen “had it been apprised of the constitutional infirmity.” Levin, 560 U. S., at 427. Although the preferred rule in the typical case is to extend favorable treatment, see Westcott, 443 U. S., at 89–90, this is hardly the typical case. 28 Extension here would render the special treatment Congress prescribed in §1409(c), the one-year physical-presence requirement for U. S.-citizen mothers, the general rule, no longer an exception. Section 1401(a)(7)’s longer physical-presence requirement, applicable to a substantial majority of children born abroad to one U. S.-citizen parent and one foreign-citizen parent, therefore, must hold sway. 29 Going forward, Congress may address the issue and settle on a uniform prescription that neither favors nor disadvantages any person on the basis of gender. In the interim,as the Government suggests, §1401(a)(7)’s now-five-year requirement should apply, prospectively, to children born to unwed U. S.-citizen mothers. See Brief for Petitioner 12, 51; Reply Brief 19, n. 3.