Maria Carmen Morin-Moreno v. United States

The government prosecuted Ms. Morin under a statute with undisputed racist origins. Congress criminalized 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.” It reenacted the provision in 1952 while considering what one senator called, in the Congressional Record, the “Wetback Bill.” 82 Cong. Rec. 791 (1952). The core focus of the illegal reentry provision has remained substantively the same ever since. Ninety-nine percent of its prosecutions are against LatinAmericans. The circuit courts have upheld the law based on its reenactment in 1952, as well as its non-substantive amendments in the 1980s and 1990s. None has seriously grappled with the law’s “uncomfortable past.” Ramos v. Louisiana, 590 U.S. 83, 99 n.44 (2020). 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 statute charged in over onethird of all federal criminal prosecutions last year. The question presented is: Whether a legislature can cleanse the taint of a racially discriminatory law by silent reenactment and amendment when the law was originally adopted for an impermissible discriminatory purpose. prefix