United States v. Mayea-Pulido, No. 18-50223 (9th Cir. 2020)
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The Ninth Circuit affirmed defendant's conviction for illegal reentry by a previously deported alien in violation of 8 U.S.C. 1326, and the revocation of supervised release. Defendant argued that he should have automatically become a United States citizen as a result of the naturalization of one of his parents prior to the reentry at issue. However, because his parents were married, and the derivative citizenship statute at 8 U.S.C. 1432(a) required married parents to both naturalize to confer citizenship to their child, he did not become a citizen. Defendant claimed that, by making his parents' marital status a factor in the derivative citizenship determination, section 1432(a) violates the Constitution's equal protection guarantee.
The panel held that rational basis review applies to section 1432(a) for reasons separate and apart from those relied on in Barthelemy v. Ashcroft, 329 F.3d 1062 (9th Cir. 2003). Furthermore, Barthelemy's holding that section 1432(a) is rational is not irreconcilable with Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 137 S. Ct. 1678 (2017). Therefore, the panel was still bound by that portion of Barthelemy's reasoning and by its ultimate holding that section 1432(a) is constitutional. Even if the panel were not bound by the holding in Barthelemy, the panel concluded that section 1432(a) is rational because protecting the parental rights of the non-citizen parent is plainly a legitimate legislative purpose.
Court Description: Criminal Law/Immigration The panel affirmed a conviction for illegal reentry by a previously deported alien in violation of 8 U.S.C. § 1326, and the revocation of supervised release, in a case in which the defendant argued that, by making his parents’ marital status a factor in the determination of derivative citizenship, 8 U.S.C. § 1432(a) (1996) violates the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee. The defendant’s equal protection challenge focused on the difference between 8 U.S.C. § 1432(a)(1), which allows the child of parents who are not legally separated to derive citizenship only upon the naturalization of both parents, and the first clause of 8 U.S.C. § 1432(a)(3), which allows the child of legally separated parents to derive citizenship upon the naturalization of one parent if that parent has sole legal custody. The defendant argued that this statutory scheme impermissibly discriminates on the basis of parental marital status by allowing the children of legally separated parents to become U.S. citizens more easily than the children of non- separated parents. He argued that he should have automatically become a United States citizen as a result of the naturalization of one of his parents prior to the reentry in question, and that, as a result, he is not an “alien” who could be guilty of violating § 1326. Barthelemy v. Ashcroft, 329 F.3d 1062 (9th Cir. 2003), rejected a similar equal protection challenge to § 1432(a). UNITED STATES V. MAYEA-PULIDO 3 The defendant argued that Sessions v. Morales-Santana, 137 S. Ct. 1678 (2017), which held that a statutory scheme that imposed different requirements on unwed mothers and unwed fathers for conferring citizenship upon the birth of a child abroad denied equal protection, effectively overruled Barthelemy. The panel agreed with the defendant that Barthelemy’s justification for applying rational basis review—that immigration statutes must always be given deference and thus reviewed only for rationality—is clearly irreconcilable with Morales-Santana, which left open the possibility that a court may apply heightened scrutiny to a citizenship provision if there is otherwise a basis to do so. The panel held that for reasons separate and apart from those relied on in Barthelemy, rational basis review applies to § 1432(a)’s classifications of children based on their parents’ marital status at a time after their birth or on a parent’s custody status over them. Reviewing § 1432(a) for a rational basis, the panel wrote that it remains bound by the holding in Barthelemy that the statute survives that deferential standard; and that even if it were not bound by Barthelemy, it would conclude that § 1432(a) is rational because protecting the parental rights of the non-citizen parent is plainly a legitimate legislative purpose. 4 UNITED STATES V. MAYEA-PULIDO
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