"The Groundbreaking Decision That Just Struck a Blow to Our Racist Immigration Laws"

Elie Mystal for the Netion discussed the recent ruling in U.S. v. Carrillo-Lopez, in which U.S. District Judge Miranda Du declared 8 U.S.C. Section 1326, outlawing illegal re-entry into the country, violated Equal Protection. I blogged about the ruling shortly after it was issued.

Mystal writes:

"The opinion is thorough and well-reasoned, and Judge Du’s arguments are so obvious in retrospect that it’s kind of amazing they aren’t a staple of the immigration debate in this country. But this is where Judge Du’s background perhaps becomes important.

Miranda Du was born in Ca Mau, Vietnam, in 1969. Her family fled the nation after the Vietnam War when she was 9, first to Malaysia, before eventually making its way to Alabama. She went to Berkeley for law school and was an employment lawyer in Nevada when Harry Reid and Barack Obama made her a federal district judge in 2011. . . . One of the more striking parts of her opinion in this case is the section in which she calls out other courts for not [striking down the statute sooner] doing this sooner. She essentially says that courts in other jurisdictions that have looked at Section 1326 have blindly accepted the government’s reasoning that the 1952 reauthorization cleansed the statute of its racial bias, without really looking at the 1952 Congress.

The opinion is brilliant, and I’m going to print it out so I’ll still have a copy of it when Justice Samuel Alito and the other conservatives on the Supreme Court reverse it and order Du’s opinion to be nuked from orbit. . . .  After all, the Supreme Court found bigotry to be okay in Trump v. Hawaii, which upheld the Muslim ban, so finding a reason to uphold Section 1326 will be child’s play for the conservatives who like a little bigotry in their immigration rulings."

KJ