Abstract
For well over a century, immigration has occupied a constitutionally unique niche within US public law. Noncitizens in immigration proceedings are routinely denied constitutional guarantees, including due process and equal protection, that apply in virtually every other legal setting. Courts justify their extraordinary deference to the government by invoking a presumptive nexus between immigration, on the one hand, and national security and foreign affairs, on the other. Critically, courts cite the national security/foreign affairs nexus regardless of whether the specific regulation or enforcement action under review has any plausible bearing on those interests. This article is the first to demonstrate empirically that immigration law’s presumed national security/foreign affairs nexus rests on a fiction. Using data available from the Executive Office of Immigration Review, we analyzed the case files of more than six million immigration cases adjudicated between 1996 and 2021. Our analysis of the approximately 9.7 million charging codes entered in those cases indicates that the government identified a national security or foreign affairs issue as a basis for removal in just .013 percent of cases. These empirical findings have important implications for the future of judicial review in immigration cases. If the proportion of cases that purportedly implicate national security or foreign affairs is, as our data indicates, vanishingly small, it makes little sense for this exceedingly rare class of cases to dictate the standard of judicial review for the 99.987 percent of immigration cases that do not involve those exceptional governmental interests. Instead, reviewing courts should approach immigration law for what it is: a miscellany of statutes, regulations, and enforcement actions that concern civil violations of immigration law, the removal consequences of criminal convictions, labor, public health and welfare, and, very infrequently, national security or foreign affairs. Under such an approach, the vast majority of immigration regulations would be reviewed under the same substantive, judicially enforceable constitutional norms that apply in nonimmigration legal settings. In the context of detention, for example, noncitizens who are detained pursuant to removal proceedings would be entitled to the same due process rights as criminal suspects or allegedly dangerous mentally ill persons. The government would retain broad latitude in immigration cases that involve bona fide national security or foreign affairs interests, but it would no longer enjoy the categorical judicial deference that it currently receives as a matter of course.
Recommended Citation
Anthony J. DeMattee, Matthew J. Lindsay & Hallie Ludsin,
An Unreasonable Presumption: The National Security/Foreign Affairs Nexus in Immigration Law,
88 Brook. L. Rev.
747
(2023).
Available at:
https://brooklynworks.brooklaw.edu/blr/vol88/iss3/1