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This is a list of Supreme Court of the United States cases in the area of immigration law and naturalization law.
This list is a list solely of United States Supreme Court decisions about applying immigration and naturalization law. Not all Supreme Court decisions are ultimately influential and, as in other fields, not all important decisions are made at the Supreme Court level. Many federal courts issue rulings that are significant or come to be influential, but those are outside the scope of this list.
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| Complete list | ||
| By recent term | ||
| By subject matter | ||
| Other lists | ||
The United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor from 1933 to 1940 and the U.S. Department of Justice from 1940 to 2003.
United States nationality law details the conditions in which a person holds United States nationality. In the United States, nationality is typically obtained through provisions in the U.S. Constitution, various laws, and international agreements. Citizenship is a right, not a privilege. While domestic documents often use citizenship and nationality interchangeably, nationality refers to the legal means in which a person obtains a national identity and formal membership in a nation and citizenship refers to the relationship held by nationals who are also citizens.
Operation Wetback was an immigration law enforcement initiative created by Joseph Swing, the Director of the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The program was implemented in June 1954 by U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell. The short-lived operation used military-style tactics to remove Mexican immigrants—some of them American citizens—from the United States. Though millions of Mexicans had legally entered the country through joint immigration programs in the first half of the 20th century and some who were naturalized citizens who were once native, Operation Wetback was designed to send them to Mexico.
Walter Polovchak is a Ukrainian-American man who, as a child, became the center of the legal case Polovchak v. Meese after he refused, at 12, to leave the United States to return to Ukraine, then part of the USSR, with his parents.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is an agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that administers the country's naturalization and immigration system. It is a successor to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), which was dissolved by the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and replaced by three components within the DHS: USCIS, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967), was a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, which ruled that citizens of the United States may not be deprived of their citizenship involuntarily. The U.S. government had attempted to revoke the citizenship of Beys Afroyim, a man born in Poland, because he had cast a vote in an Israeli election after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court decided that Afroyim's right to retain his citizenship was guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In so doing, the Court struck down a federal law mandating loss of U.S. citizenship for voting in a foreign election—thereby overruling one of its own precedents, Perez v. Brownell (1958), in which it had upheld loss of citizenship under similar circumstances less than a decade earlier.
Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44 (1958), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court affirmed Congress's right to revoke United States citizenship as a result of a citizen's voluntary performance of specified actions, even in the absence of any intent or desire on the person's part to lose citizenship. Specifically, the Supreme Court upheld an act of Congress which provided for revocation of citizenship as a consequence of voting in a foreign election.
Carol Weiss King was a well-known immigration lawyer, renowned for her advocacy in defending the civil rights of immigrants, key founder of the International Juridical Association, and a founding member of the National Lawyers Guild in the United States. Her left-leaning career spanned from the Palmer Raids to the McCarthy Era.
Immigration and Naturalization Service v. St. Cyr, 533 U.S. 289 (2001), is a United States Supreme Court case involving habeas corpus and INA § 212(c) relief for deportable aliens.
During the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, the United States had limited regulation of immigration and naturalization at a national level. Under a mostly prevailing "open border" policy, immigration was generally welcomed, although citizenship was limited to “white persons” as of 1790, and naturalization subject to five year residency requirement as of 1802. Passports and visas were not required for entry to America, rules and procedures for arriving immigrants were determined by local ports of entry or state laws, and processes for naturalization were determined by local county courts.
Schneider v. Rusk, 377 U.S. 163 (1964), was a 5–3 United States Supreme Court case that invalidated a law that stripped naturalized Americans of their citizenship as a result of extended or permanent residence abroad. Relying on the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, the court ruled it generally was unconstitutional to treat naturalized and natural-born citizens differently.
The Nationality Act of 1940 revised numerous provisions of law relating to American citizenship and naturalization. It was enacted by the 76th Congress of the United States and signed into law on October 14, 1940, a year after World War II had begun in Europe, but before the U.S. entered the war.
United States ex rel. Accardi v. Shaughnessy, 347 U.S. 260 (1954), is a landmark United States Supreme Court case, in administrative law, in which the Court held that administrative agencies in the Federal Government are obliged to follow their own regulations, policies and procedures. Under the Accardi doctrine, named after this case, federal agencies which do not follow their own regulations or procedures run the risk of having their actions invalidated if challenged in court.
Maslenjak v. United States, 582 U.S. ___ (2017), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held that the government cannot revoke the citizenship of a naturalized U.S. citizen based on an immaterial false statement made by the citizen in their naturalization application.
Isaac Shorr was a 20th-century American immigration and naturalization lawyer and philosophical anarchist who worked with other important, radical lawyers in the 1920s–1940s and whose legal partners included: Swinburne Hale, Walter Nelles, Joseph R. Brodsky, and Carol Weiss King.
Boutilier v. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 387 U.S. 118 (1967), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court upheld Clive Michael Boutilier's deportation from the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 due to his history of homosexual activities. The Act itself did not specify homosexuality among its exclusion criteria, but the Court held that Congress clearly intended that a homosexual individual be excluded from entry into the United States as one "afflicted with [a] psychopathic personality." The decision was abrogated by the Immigration Act of 1990, which rejected sexual orientation as a basis for excluding an individual from immigration.
Federal policy oversees and regulates immigration to the United States and citizenship of the United States. The United States Congress has authority over immigration policy in the United States, and it delegates enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security. Historically, the United States went through a period of loose immigration policy in the early-19th century followed by a period of strict immigration policy in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Policy areas related to the immigration process include visa policy, asylum policy, and naturalization policy. Policy areas related to illegal immigration include deferral policy and removal policy.
Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953), was a United States Supreme Court case that established the federal government's power to detain migrants at the border pending deportation. The Supreme Court, in a five to four decision, held that the Attorney General's continued exclusion of the unauthorized immigrant without a hearing does not amount to an unlawful detention, and the court may not temporarily admit such individuals into the United States pending arrangements for their departure abroad. Some consider the decision in Shaughnessy v. United States ex rel Mezei as the Court's strongest statement of the plenary power doctrine as the power to permanently exclude noncitizens is based in U.S. sovereignty and largely immune from judicial control.
United States ex rel. Knauff v. Shaughnessy, 338 U.S. 537 (1950), was a United States Supreme Court case that notably ruled that the executive and legislative branches have the inherent power to exclude immigrants from the United States, that courts lack jurisdiction regarding the deportation of individuals within the United States unless it is explicitly stated in law, and that the Constitution does not grant aliens any protections when trying to enter the United States. In a four-to-three decision, this case firmly demonstrates the plenary powers of Congress and the Executive Branch, as it is one of the first cases that bars the judicial review of executive or legislative orders of exclusion in most circumstances.