US Supreme Court Opens The Doors For States To Deport Immigrants

Via America’s Lawyer: Mike Papantonio is joined by the VP of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Allen Orr, to explain how a U.S. Supreme Court decision will give states greater authority in criminalizing improper work documentation filed by undocumented immigrants, going so far as to prosecute them for identity theft when seeking employment.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

US Supreme Court has overturned a Kansas ruling involving the prosecution of undocumented immigrants using false social security numbers when they apply for work. This is going to open the door for States to more aggressively crack down on immigration. We're joined now by Allen Orr, vice president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, and an all around very smart, very smart lawyer, has done a lot to help American, help immigrants all over this country. Allen, how are you?

Well, thank you for having me.

Now, first of all, could you tell us a little bit about Kansas? You know what, the way I understand this is it's a preemption, what we would call a fight on a preemption issue, which is the, what, what is the relationship between a state's right versus the federal preemptive right to preemptive orders. That's kinda what this is coming down to, isn't it?

Right. Well, exactly. It's coming down to federalism and an understanding of who enforces immigration laws. Is it a federal issue or is it a state issue? And when there is written context within federal statutes with regards to what form and the information on that form can be used for, can States use it for something else? That is specifically what it sort of narrows down to.

So Kansas said, look, we have the right to criminally prosecute if we have laws that put these, that say that this particular person did something wrong. Yes, we're familiar with the fact that the feds have some involvement in this arena, but we haven't lost our right under, under what we call health, safety and welfare protection of our citizens to do what we wanted to do. So what they've done is they've said to immigrants, what, what are they saying to immigrants right now?

So I think it's a far stretch to just talk about the facts of the case, specifically. In this case, these three individuals were pulled over for a traffic violation. So it wasn't an audit procedure at a company to see if the checking the company documents with the, what the government can do at any level, which is sort of relegated to the federal government. And then they sort of went and found these documents and then they added on this charge. And people being here undocumented is a civil violation, right? Some, and in most States when you validate an identity, it is a felony. So it is a work around to give States the ability to sort of enforce some type of immigration law because charging them with that felony would make them automatically deportable.

So what we have here is we have, it's kind of a Bonanza to go after immigrants on issues like, you know, I used this, this ID because I needed work. I needed to use a, I had to use a social security number because I needed a job to support my family. And they're saying, well you shouldn't be here to begin with, so we're going to use this element of violating the law really as a reason to send you back to where you came from. Up until this ruling, how has work authorizations for undocumented immigrants been handled by our court system, up until the time that this Kansas case has been tested by the Supreme Court?

Right. So this case is specifically about the forms. So generally the local state enforcement officers would not use I-9 form to enforce some kind of state rules such as the sort of identity fraud rules. It would only be the federal government that would come in either through an audit or through some kind of enforcement action to sort of get these documents and sort through them for the company.

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