WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down a gender distinction in U.S. immigration law that treats mothers and fathers differently when determining a child’s citizenship, calling such inequality “stunningly anachronistic.”

FILE PHOTO - The Supreme Court is seen in Washington, DC, U.S. April 7, 2017. REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein

The high court, in a 8-0 ruling authored by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, found that a provision in federal law that defines how people born overseas can be eligible for U.S. citizenship violated the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection guarantee.

The ruling, however, may not help the man who brought the case, New York resident Luis Morales-Santana, who was seeking to avoid deportation to the Dominican Republic after being convicted of several offenses.

The law requires that unwed fathers who are American citizens spend at least five years living in the United States - a 2012 amendment reduced it from 10 years - before they can confer citizenship to a child born abroad, out of wedlock and to a partner who is not a U.S. citizen.

For unwed U.S. mothers in the same situation, the requirement was only one year.

In the ruling, the Supreme Court said that until Congress revises the law, both women and men will be covered by the five-year requirement.

Ginsburg, known for her work on gender equality before she became a jurist, wrote for the court that in light of the Supreme Court’s various rulings regarding the equal protection guarantee since 1971, having separate “duration-of-residence requirements for unwed mothers and fathers who have accepted parental responsibility is stunningly anachronistic.”

The arguments made in defense of the law by former President Barack Obama’s administration before he left office in January “cannot withstand inspection under a Constitution that requires the government to respect the equal dignity and stature of its male and female citizens,” Ginsburg wrote.

Morales-Santana’s deceased father was an American citizen, while his mother was not. His father failed to meet the law’s five-year requirements by 20 days.

His lawyer, Stephen Broome, said he is reviewing how the ruling affects his client.

Morales-Santana, 54, was born in the Dominican Republican and has lived legally in the United States since 1975. He was convicted of several criminal offenses in 1995, including two counts of robbery and four counts of attempted murder. The U.S. government has sought to deport him since 2000.

The high court split 4-4 on the same issue in 2011.

In July 2015, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York sided with Morales-Santana and struck down the law at issue, saying it applied “impermissible stereotyping” in imposing a tougher burden on fathers. The U.S. Justice Department sought to defend the law and asked the high court to take the case.

The case is one of several with immigration-related themes that are before the justices at a time when President Donald Trump’s administration is pursing efforts to strengthen immigration enforcement.</s>Federal immigration laws that make citizenship easier to obtain for the children of US citizen mothers than for the children of US citizen fathers are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court held on Monday.

The court stopped short, however, of providing Luis Ramón Morales-Santana with a ruling that he — whose late father was a US citizen — and others like him should have their citizenship determined by the easier-obtained rule for those with US-citizen mothers.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the court, noted that the laws dictating citizenship requirements for those born abroad to unmarried parents — found in the Immigration and Nationality Act — "date from an era when the lawbooks of our Nation were rife with overbroad gen­eralizations about the way men and women are."

Now, however, laws that treat men and women differently are "subject to ... heightened scrutiny," Ginsburg wrote. Ginsburg argued for that heightened scrutiny as a lawyer, voted for as a judge and justice, and has written about previously on the high court. Under such scrutiny, she went on, the different treatment of mothers and fathers in the citizenship laws at issue cannot stand.

Describing the "assumptions" that "pervaded" the laws when the laws in question were written in 1940, Ginsburg wrote: "In marriage, husband is dominant, wife subordinate; unwed mother is the natural and sole guardian of a non-marital child."

Those ideas — particularly the latter — were made law in the INA. Because of that, a child born abroad to a US-citizen father only automatically becomes a US citizen at birth if his or her father lived in the US for 10 years, at least 5 of which were after the man turned 14. A child born abroad to a US-citizen mother, on the other hand automatically becomes a US citizen at birth so long as her or his mother spent one year in the US.

"In light of the equal protection jurisprudence this Court has developed since 1971," Ginsburg wrote, the different treatment of unwed mothers and unwed fathers in the immigration law citizenship context "is stunningly anachronistic."

Ginsburg went on to hold that none of the government's claimed justifications for the law could save it from being held to be unconstitutional.

She went on, however, to hold that the answer could not be for the court to hold that children of US-citizen fathers should be able to use the citizenship standard for those with US-citizen mothers — which had been an exception to the general rule.

"Extension here would render the special treatment Congress prescribed [for unwed US-citizen mothers] the general rule, no longer an excep­tion," Ginsburg wrote. "Going for­ward, Congress may address the issue and settle on a uniform prescription that neither favors nor disadvantages any person on the basis of gender. In the interim ... [the] now-five-year requirement [that applies generally] should apply, prospectively, to children born to unwed U. S.-citizen mothers."

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Samuel Alito, concurred only in the court's judgment that Morales-Santana should not be able to get the relief he sought — citizenship by applying the one-year rule for unwed mothers to fathers. Justice Neil Gorsuch did not participate in the case.</s>WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court Monday struck down an immigration law that treated unmarried mothers better than unmarried fathers, ruling that “stunningly anachronistic” stereotypes about the sexes couldn’t justify a preference for women over men.

“The gender line Congress drew is incompatible with the requirement that the government accord to all persons ‘the equal protection of the laws,’” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the...</s>WASHINGTON (AP) — A unanimous Supreme Court on Monday struck down part of an unusual immigration law that treats fathers and mothers differently when it comes to conferring citizenship on children born outside the U.S. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the 1940s-era law "stunningly anachronistic" in the way it stereotypes men and woman. Her opinion cites ...</s>Immigrants pose with U.S citizenship certificates in front of a large U.S. flag after a naturalization ceremony at the Los Angeles Convention Center in February. A Supreme Court decision Monday will put the foreign-born children of unmarried American fathers on equal footing with those of unwed American mothers. That may mean longer waits for the latter, at least in the short term.

 Image credit: Jae C. Hong

The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a federal law based on what the justices called “stunning stereotypes” — among them that most men care little about their children born out of wedlock.

Under the law, a child born abroad to an unwed American mother automatically becomes a U.S. citizen if the mother previously lived in the U.S. for a period of at least one year.

In contrast, the child of an unwed father can’t become a U.S. citizen unless the father has lived in the U.S. for a continuous period of five years, two of them when he was over the age of 14.

Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that the different gender lines drawn by Congress violate the Constitution’s guarantee to equal protection of the law.

The case was brought by Luis Ramón Morales-Santana, born in the Dominican Republic to unwed parents — a mother from the D.R. and a U.S.-citizen father who had been working on a construction project there.

Morales-Santana’s father fell 20 days short of the U.S. residency required to qualify his son for automatic citizenship at birth, but the father took responsibility for the son; the parents eventually married and put the father’s name on the birth certificate.

Morales-Santana came to the U.S. with his parents as a permanent resident. But in 2000, after he was convicted of several felonies, the government sought to deport him.

Morales-Santana then challenged the citizenship law as unconstitutional sex discrimination, and on Monday the Supreme Court agreed: the child of an unwed American mother cannot be granted automatic citizenship more quickly than the child of an unwed American father.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority — and in many ways for her the opinion was a trip down memory lane.

Ginsburg cited decisions she briefed and argued as an attorney nearly 50 years ago — decisions that transformed the law and put gender discrimination nearly on a par with unconstitutional race discrimination.

This decision is a major victory for the justice, who for 20 years battled unsuccessfully for equal treatment of men and women seeking to pass citizenship on to their children. On Monday she was able to turn the corner.

It’s the fourth time in two decades that the court has grappled with some version of this issue. In 2001, the justices upheld the differential treatment by a 5-to-4 vote, and twice the court failed to reach a majority ruling.

On Monday however, the vote was 6-to-2 to require equal treatment of unwed mothers, fathers and their children. Joining in the Ginsburg opinion were not just the court’s other liberals, but Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Breaking eggs to get to a six-justice majority

But the decision left what Ginsburg called the “vexing problem” of what to do next.

The rule in a typical case would be to extend the favorable treatment of one sex — in this case women — to men. But here, Ginsburg observed, favorable treatment for mothers was the exception to the general rule in the statute.

She said the court was not free to make the exception into the general rule. Instead, she said, it is up to Congress to set the same rule for everyone.

In the meantime, Ginsburg said, the law would have to be equalized by making unwed mothers abide by the tougher citizenship rules that in the past have applied to unwed fathers — which means Morales-Santana would not qualify for citizenship.

University of Chicago law professor Mary Anne Case says she suspects that it “broke [Ginsburg’s] heart” to have to do it this way. “This is an omelet that they made by breaking some eggs,” she said.

Still, the court for the first time has applied the concept of gender equality to the nation’s citizenship laws.</s>– Unwed mothers and fathers may not be treated differently in determining whether their children may claim U.S. citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled Monday.

“The gender line Congress drew is incompatible with the requirement that the government accord to all persons ‘the equal protection of the laws,’ ” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote for the majority.

The case concerned Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, who was born in 1962 in the Dominican Republic. His father was a U.S. citizen, but his mother was not. His parents were unwed but later married.

The family moved to the United States when Morales-Santana was 13, and he lived in this country for decades. After convictions for robbery, attempted murder and other crimes, federal authorities sought to deport him.

He resisted, claiming U.S. citizenship. But the law in effect when he was born allowed unwed fathers of children born abroad to transmit citizenship to them only if the fathers had lived in the United States before the child was born for a total of 10 years, five of them after age 14. Morales-Santana’s father fell just short of satisfying that requirement.

The same law made it much easier for unwed mothers to transmit citizenship to their children, requiring them to have lived in the United States for a year before their child was born. (The law has since been amended, but it continues to favor mothers over fathers.)

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled for Morales-Santana, saying that the differing treatment of mothers and fathers was unconstitutional sex discrimination. The appeals court declared him a citizen.

Ginsburg agreed that the law was based on stereotypes that violated equal protection principles. The law, she wrote, was built on a faulty assumption “that unwed fathers care little about, indeed are strangers to, their children.”

“Lump characterization of that kind, however, no longer passes equal protection inspection,” Ginsburg wrote.

In a second decision Monday, Henson v. Santander Consumer USA, Justice Neil Gorsuch issued his first opinion. Writing for a unanimous court, he said that it was for Congress rather than the court to address a possible gap in a federal debt collection law.

When Congress enacted the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act in 1977, it imposed strict regulations on firms that collected other companies’ debts. But it did not address the activities of businesses like banks, credit card companies and car dealerships that collect their own debts.

That distinction failed to anticipate an increasingly popular business model, in which companies buy distressed debt outright and then try to collect it. The question in the case was whether such companies qualified as debt collectors under the law.

Gorsuch concluded that the law as written did not reach the new business model.

“While it is of course our job to apply faithfully the law Congress has written,” Gorsuch wrote, “it is never our job to rewrite a constitutionally valid statutory text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done had it faced a question that, on everyone’s account, it never faced.”</s>The Supreme Court struck down on Monday a provision of a law that made it more difficult for unmarried fathers to pass their American citizenship onto kids born overseas.

In an unanimous 8-0 ruling, the Court decided that a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 — which required unwed American fathers to live in the US for at least five years after the age of 14 in order to grant citizenship to their kids, compared to only one for mothers — was unconstitutional.

"Those disparate criteria, we hold, cannot withstand inspection under a Constitution that requires the Government to respect the equal dignity and stature of its male and female citizens," Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the court's opinion. In the case, New York resident Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, who was born to a now-deceased American father and a Dominican mother, risked being deported to the Dominican Republic after committing a series of crimes in 1995. Morales-Santana, who came to the US in 1975 as a lawful permanent resident, claimed that he was a US citizen because of his father. Though his father was an American citizen, he lived in the US for 20 days less than the five-year residency requirement. Speaking for the rest of the court, Ginsburg wrote that such discrepancies came from a time when the husband was considered to be "dominant" while the mother was "the natural and sole guardian of a non-marital child. The one-year residency requirement will now apply to both mothers and fathers looking to grant citizenship to their kids. Despite striking down the section of the law, the Court said that it could not grant Morales-Santana citizenship and that would have to be decided by Congress.</s>Some eagle-eyed attorneys might have noticed that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg referred to “gender” and not “sex” discrimination in her high-court opinion Monday striking down as unconstitutional the unequal treatment afforded unwed American fathers and mothers whose children are born abroad.

The justice’s choice was intentional, as she criticized the federal law that had permitted the children immediate American citizenship if their mother was a U.S. citizen who lived in the United States just one year prior to giving birth but required American fathers to have lived in the United States for 10 years for the child to be considered an American at birth. In striking down the law, the court held that the 10-year residency requirement must apply to mothers and fathers unless and until Congress set a different time frame without regard to “gender,” Ginsburg wrote in Sessions v. Luis Ramon Morales-Santana.

Ginsburg explained why she prefers to refer to the evil as “gender” discrimination at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1993.

“In the 1970s when I was (teaching) at Columbia (University law school) and writing briefs, articles and speeches about distinctions based on sex, I had a bright secretary,” Ginsburg told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “She said one day, ‘I have been typing this word, sex, sex, sex, over and over. Let me tell you, the audience you are addressing, the men you are addressing’ – and they were all men in the appellate courts in those days – ‘the first association of that word is not what you are talking about. So I suggest that you use a grammar-book term. Use the word ‘gender.’ It will ward off distracting associations.’”</s>The Supreme Court on Monday struck down part of an unusual law that treats fathers and mothers differently when it comes to conferring citizenship on children born outside the U.S. The 8-0 ruling affects a law that applies to children born abroad to one parent who is an American and one who isn't. The law made ...</s>WASHINGTON (AP) - A unanimous Supreme Court on Monday struck down part of an unusual immigration law that treats fathers and mothers differently when it comes to conferring citizenship on children born outside the U.S.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called the 1940s-era law "stunningly anachronistic" in the way it stereotypes men and woman. Her opinion cites several landmark discrimination cases that she successfully argued before the high court for the principle that having one rule for mothers and another for fathers is unconstitutional.

But in a twist, the ruling failed to provide any relief to Luis Ramon Morales-Santana, the New York resident who successfully challenged the law. The court said tougher - not easier - standards for attaining citizenship should apply to everyone.

The ruling affects a law that applies to children born abroad to one parent who is an American and one who isn't. The law made it harder for children of unwed American fathers to gain citizenship themselves.

Under the law, a child born outside the United States to an unwed citizen father and a noncitizen mother can become a U.S. citizen at birth if the father lived in the U.S. for five years, with at least two of those years coming after the age of 14. But an American mother must only have lived in the U.S. continuously for one year to meet the requirement.

A challenge came from Morales-Santana, who was born in the Dominican Republic to an unwed U.S. citizen father and a Dominican mother and moved to the U.S. when he was 13. He asserted he was a U.S. citizen after authorities sought to deport him following convictions for robbery and attempted murder. But his father did not satisfy the five-year requirement.

A federal appeals court struck down the law and said the shorter one-year period must apply to both unwed fathers and mothers. The Obama administration appealed.

Ginsburg said the law was based on flawed and outdated assumptions about men and women that pervaded the country's citizenship laws: "In marriage, husband is dominant, wife subordinate; unwed mother is the natural and sole guardian of a nonmarital child."

For close to a half century, she said, the court "has viewed with suspicion laws that rely on overbroad generalizations about the different talents, capacities or preferences of males and females." Ginsburg said the gender line Congress drew "is incompatible with the Constitution's guarantee of the equal protection of the laws to all persons."

The government had urged the justices to uphold the law's gender-based differences. The Justice Department said Congress wanted to make sure there is a strong connection between a child born overseas and the United States before granting citizenship. The law also considered the practices of other countries.

But while the court struck down the gender differences in the law, Ginsburg said the longer five-year period should continue apply to both mothers and fathers until Congress decides on a different length of time. That means Morales-Santana is still unable to win his citizenship case.

"Going forward, Congress may address the issue and settle on a uniform prescription that neither favors nor disadvantages any person on the basis of gender," Ginsburg said.

Ginsburg's opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Justice Clarence Thomas agreed with the outcome, but wrote separately to say that it was not necessary to rule on the constitutionality of the law since Morales-Santana could not get any relief. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

Justice Neil Gorsuch did not take part in the case, which was argued before his confirmation to the court.
In a unanimous decision (8–0), the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down a gender distinction in U.S. immigration law that treats mothers and fathers differently.