WASHINGTON — WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled on Friday against a California woman who said her rights were violated after federal officials refused to let her husband into the country, in part because of how his tattoos were interpreted.
The 6-3 decision along ideological lines found that citizens do not necessarily have the right to participate in federal government decisions about whether immigrant husband s can legally live in the US
“While Congress has made it easier for spouses to immigrate, it has never made spousal immigration a matter of right,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett, reading from the bench the majority opinion, which was followed by her fellow conservatives.
While a citizen “certainly has a fundamental right to marriage,” Barrett said, “it is a fallacy to move from that premise to the conclusion that American citizens have a fundamental right that could limit how Congress exercises the sovereign power of the nation exercises to admit or exclude marriages. foreigners.”
In a dissent joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said that denying citizens the right to seek specific reasons why their spouses are denied entry “seriously underestimates the right to marriage in the immigration context.”
The majority ruled against Los Angeles civil rights attorney Sandra Muñoz, who was last able to live with her Salvadoran husband nearly a decade ago.
The couple started the process of obtaining an immigrant visa after they got married in 2010. Luis Asencio-Cordero, who had been living in the US without legal status, had to travel to the consulate in San Salvador to complete the process.
But once there, the consular officer denied his application, citing a law that denies entry to people who might participate in unlawful activities.
The State Department would not provide a more specific reason, but after filing a lawsuit, they learned that the denial was based in part on a consular officer’s determination that his tattoos likely meant he had ties to the MS-13 gang.
Asencio-Cordero has denied any association with any gang and has no criminal history. The tattoos, which included Our Lady of Guadalupe, theatrical masks and a profile of psychologist Sigmund Freud, instead expressed his intellectual interests and Catholic faith, his lawyers said in court filings.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Muñoz and ordered the State Department to share the reason and reconsider the visa application.
That ruling was rejected by the Supreme Court after the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appealed.
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Associated Press writer Fatima Hussein contributed to this report.