Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1893

Fong Yue Ting v. United States

149 U.S. 698 | 13 S. Ct. 1016 | 37 L. Ed. 905 | 1893 U.S. LEXIS 2340

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case constitutionalized the plenary-power doctrine by holding that Congress may require registration and deport resident aliens as an exercise of the national power over immigration, while the dissents warned that deportation of lawful residents is punishment constrained by due process.

Background

The cases arose under § 6 of the Geary Act of 1892. The Act required Chinese laborers who were lawfully present and entitled to remain in the United States to obtain a certificate of residence within one year. A laborer found without a certificate was presumed unlawfully present and could be arrested and brought before a federal judge for deportation unless he proved both an unavoidable reason for lacking the certificate and his residence in the United States at the Act's passage, the latter through at least one credible white witness.

Fong Yue Ting and Wong Quan had not applied for certificates and were arrested by federal marshals. Lee Joe had applied, but the collector refused to issue a certificate because Lee could offer only Chinese witnesses to prove his residence. Each challenged the statute through habeas corpus. The Circuit Court dismissed the writs or upheld deportation orders, and the Supreme Court affirmed.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether Congress has constitutional authority to expel resident aliens, including Chinese laborers who had lawfully entered and resided in the United States.

Holding

Yes. Congress possesses an inherent national power to exclude and expel aliens, and that power extends to resident Chinese laborers who have not become citizens.

Reasoning

The Court treated exclusion and deportation as connected parts of the same sovereign power. A nation may refuse admission to foreigners and may also require aliens already within its territory to depart when their presence is considered inconsistent with the public welfare. That authority belongs to the United States as a sovereign nation responsible for foreign relations, national security, and relations with other countries.

The Constitution commits foreign-affairs powers to the national government: the President conducts diplomacy and executes federal law, while Congress regulates foreign commerce, naturalization, war, and related matters. Because immigration and removal of aliens directly concern international relations, the states have no comparable authority and Congress may regulate the subject through legislation.

Chinese laborers lawfully residing in the United States remained aliens. While permitted to stay, they were entitled to constitutional and legal protections for their persons and property, but they had not acquired a permanent constitutional right to remain. Congress could withdraw the permission to remain when, in its judgment, the public interest required removal.

The Court relied heavily on Chae Chan Ping v. United States, which had sustained Congress's power to exclude a Chinese laborer who had previously lived in the United States and held a return certificate. That decision established that a statutory permission to enter or return was a revocable governmental license, not a vested personal right that Congress could not later alter.

Issue #2

Whether Congress could require Chinese laborers to register and obtain certificates of residence as a condition of remaining in the United States.

Holding

Yes. Congress could establish a registration and identification system to administer its authority over the presence and removal of aliens.

Reasoning

Having authority to expel a class of aliens or to allow that class to remain on conditions, Congress could reasonably require registration and identification of the persons allowed to stay. The certificate system supplied both an identification document for the laborer and an official record for the government.

The Court read the statute and Treasury regulations as providing a meaningful opportunity to obtain a certificate. The certificate was available without charge, at convenient locations, upon adequate proof of residence; duplicates could be issued if an original certificate was lost or destroyed.

Issue #3

Whether § 6's arrest, hearing, burden of proof, and deportation procedures denied Chinese laborers due process of law or violated constitutional criminal-procedure guarantees.

Holding

No. Deportation under § 6 was a civil exercise of the political power over aliens, not punishment for a crime, and the hearing Congress supplied satisfied due process.

Reasoning

Congress could have assigned removal decisions entirely to executive officers, just as it could assign factual determinations concerning exclusion to executive officials. Instead, § 6 provided a hearing before a United States judge to decide whether the alien had met the statutory conditions for remaining in the country. That proceeding presented a judicially cognizable controversy between the United States and the arrested laborer.

The lack of a certificate did not conclusively establish unlawful presence. It created a presumption that the laborer could rebut by showing an unavoidable reason for failing to obtain a certificate and, where necessary, proof of residence. The Court viewed this allocation of proof as a permissible legislative rule of evidence.

Congress also could require proof of residence through at least one credible white witness. In the Court's view, legislatures may prescribe what evidence courts may receive and what effect evidence will have. The Court analogized the requirement to long-standing naturalization rules requiring an applicant's residence to be established by citizens' testimony.

Deportation was not punishment for an offense. The Court distinguished transportation, which punishes a crime, and extradition, which sends an accused person elsewhere for trial, from deportation, which removes an alien because the political branches have determined that the alien may no longer remain. Because removal was not criminal punishment, the jury-trial, Fourth Amendment, and cruel-and-unusual-punishment protections invoked by the laborers did not apply.

Issue #4

Whether treaties and earlier federal laws giving Chinese laborers permission to reside or travel in the United States barred Congress from imposing the 1892 registration-and-deportation regime.

Holding

No. A later valid Act of Congress may modify or supersede earlier treaty-based permissions concerning aliens' presence in the United States.

Reasoning

Treaties and federal statutes are each part of the supreme law of the land, but neither has categorical priority over the other in domestic judicial proceedings. When Congress clearly expresses a later contrary rule within its constitutional authority, that later expression of sovereign will controls.

The Court acknowledged that Chinese laborers had entered and lived under treaty provisions and prior statutes. But those arrangements did not transfer or surrender Congress's sovereign authority over exclusion and removal, nor did they create an irrevocable individual entitlement to remain in the country.

Dissents

Justice Brewer

Reasoning

Justice Brewer began from the premise that the affected laborers were not arriving at the border but were lawful resident aliens who had made homes and livelihoods in the United States, in some cases for many years. Their lawful residence was recognized by treaties and by § 6 itself, which applied to laborers already entitled to remain.

In his view, the Constitution protects persons, not merely citizens. Although Congress might possess broad power to exclude persons who had not entered the country, a resident alien within United States territory was protected by the Fifth Amendment and other constitutional restraints on federal power. The majority's appeal to an undefined inherent sovereignty risked converting a government of limited, enumerated powers into one with unbounded authority.

Brewer regarded deportation as punishment of exceptional severity because it meant arrest, removal from one's home, family, property, friends, and work, and forced exile to a distant country. Since the statute imposed that consequence for failure to possess a certificate, it could not be imposed without the procedural protections required when liberty is taken away.

The Act, in his view, permitted arbitrary treatment. It gave officials excessive control over issuing certificates, allowed arrest without ordinary criminal safeguards, placed the burden on the laborer to establish his right to stay, and required proof by a white witness without providing an effective means to secure one. These features made the process oppressive rather than constitutionally adequate.

Brewer warned that constitutional guarantees cannot safely be weakened because a targeted group is unpopular. If Congress could disregard those guarantees to expel Chinese residents, the same asserted power could later be directed at other groups.

Justice Field

Reasoning

Justice Field accepted the Court's earlier conclusion that Congress could exclude Chinese laborers seeking entry, but sharply distinguished exclusion from deportation. In his view, the power to prevent entry did not establish a power in peacetime to expel friendly aliens who had lawfully established homes under the government's consent and treaty commitments.

He rejected the majority's theory that a general power to deport resident aliens flowed from inherent sovereignty. The federal government possesses only powers delegated by the Constitution or necessary and proper to carry out delegated powers. Historical examples of foreign governments expelling groups could not supply a constitutional power to the United States.

Field treated deportation for failing to obtain a certificate as a grave punishment, not a neutral administrative measure. The statute converted failure to register into a basis for forced removal, yet imposed that sanction without indictment, jury trial, or the protections normally required before inflicting a severe deprivation of liberty.

The statute also offended the Fourth Amendment, in Field's view, by authorizing arrests and searches for certificates without warrant, oath, probable cause, or individualized judicial authorization. Requiring residence to be proved specifically through a credible white witness compounded the arbitrariness by excluding otherwise conclusive evidence solely because of the witnesses' race.

Field warned that the decision allowed Congress to treat resident aliens as subject to despotic power despite the Constitution's guarantees. Those guarantees, he maintained, protect every person lawfully living under United States jurisdiction, not only citizens.

Chief Justice Fuller

Reasoning

Chief Justice Fuller agreed that the Constitution protects Chinese laborers who were lawfully present and entitled to remain. Therefore, whether the Geary Act's procedures deprived them of liberty without due process was a judicial question, not a political question beyond the courts' authority.

Fuller accepted that exclusion of aliens at the threshold could be committed broadly to the political branches, but maintained that expulsion of an alien who had already lawfully acquired residence stood on different ground. The government could not terminate an existing right to remain through a process unconstrained by constitutional limitations.

In Fuller's view, the Act did not simply repeal the laborers' permission to remain. It required registration for identification and then used deportation as punishment to compel compliance. That made the statute, in substance, a legislative sentence of banishment imposed without a constitutionally sufficient judicial trial.

He concluded that the Act asserted an unlimited and arbitrary power incompatible with the Constitution's basic commitment to justice and lawful process.