The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday said the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens are not violated when the government bars their non-citizen spouses from entering the country without explanation.
The court in a 6-3 decision, opens new tab said Sandra Munoz, a U.S. citizen and civil rights lawyer, cannot challenge the U.S. Department of State’s denial of her El Salvadoran husband’s visa application after the agency waited three years to explain that it suspected him of being a gang member.
The justices had previously ruled that migrants lack the constitutional right to challenge those decisions, and it now ruled that U.S. citizens don’t have the right, either.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, writing for the majority, said that “we hold that a citizen does not have a fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country.”
The case was brought by Sandra Munoz, a U.S. citizen who argued she had a right to sue to get her husband, Luis Ascencio-Cordero, a citizen of El Salvador, into the U.S.
The State Department denied him a visa because it suspected he had ties to the violent gang Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, based on four of his tattoos.
Migrants don’t generally have a right to challenge their denials, but Ms. Munoz argued she had a right because the decision was hindering her own marriage rights. She said that right is at least strong enough to earn the chance to argue her husband isn’t a member of MS-13.
Justice Barrett said the law doesn’t stretch that far.
“Munoz has suffered harm from the denial of Asencio-Cordero’s visa application, but that harm does not give her a constitutional right to participate in his consular process,” the justice wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing in dissent in Friday’s ruling, said the decision upended the fundamental right to marriage that the court recognized less than a decade ago in its landmark Obergefell ruling on same-sex marriages.
“Munoz has a constitutionally protected interest in her husband’s visa application because its denial burdened her right to marriage,” Justice Sotomayor said.
She said that goes beyond the mere right to couple — which Ms. Munoz has already done — and includes a right to build a home together, to “intimacy” and to raising children.
At the very least, Justice Sotomayor said, that right means the government owed Ms. Munoz more than the initial cursory denial it gave.
Analysts said thousands of similar cases exist, and their fate was riding on the outcome of Ms. Munoz’s argument.
The State Department last year approved 11 million visas and denied 62,000 applications. Among them were 5,400 people seeking to unite with a U.S. citizen partner.
The case presented rare common ground between the Biden administration and people who favor a stiffer approach to immigration enforcement.
They pointed out that U.S. citizens don’t have the right to argue in court that they have a marriage interest in blocking a spouse’s deportation. They said it would not make sense to create more rights in the case of someone outside the U.S. altogether.
