Samuel Mateo-Martinez v. United States

The government prosecuted Samuel Mateo-Martinez under a statute with undisputed racist origins. Congress criminalized illegal entry, as well as illegal reentry, into the United States in 1929 at the urging of “proud” white supremacists, nativists, and eugenicists to keep the American bloodline “white and purely Caucasian.” The core focus of these provisions has remained substantively the same since 1929. But the Ninth Circuit upheld the law based on a reenactment in 1952 and amendments in the 1980s and 1990s, none of which grappled with the law’s racist past. This case poses important questions about the role of appellate courts in applying the framework from Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, 429 U.S. 252 (1977), to a federal law used for a large swath of federal criminal prosecutions, along with countless civil rights cases. The question presented is: Whether a legislature can cleanse the taint of a racially discriminatory law by silent reenactment or amendment when the law was originally adopted for an impermissible discriminatory purpose. prefix