In today’s United States v. Portillo-Munoz, a divided Fifth Circuit panel holds that illegal aliens don’t have Second Amendment rights because they’re not part of “the people,” and suggests that they may lack Fourth Amendment rights as well. (The same logic might apply to the First Amendment’s Petition Clause, which also mentions a right of “the people” to peaceably assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances.) Here’s the core analysis from the majority:
The individual laying claim to the Second Amendment’s protections in Heller was a United States citizen, so the question of whether an alien, illegal or legal, has a right to bear arms was not presented, and the Court took care to note that it was not purporting to “clarify the entire field” of the Second Amendment. However, the Court’s language does provide some guidance as to the meaning of the term “the people” as it is used in the Second Amendment. The Court held the Second Amendment “surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.” Furthermore, the Court noted that “in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention ‘the people,’ the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset” before going on to say that “[w]e start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.” The Court’s language in Heller invalidates Portillo’s attempt to extend the protections of the Second Amendment to illegal aliens. Illegal aliens are not “law-abiding citizens” or “members of the political community,” and aliens who enter or remain in this country illegally and without authorization are not Americans as that word is commonly understood.
Prior to its decision in Heller, the Supreme Court interpreted the meaning of the phrase “the people” in the context of the Fourth Amendment and indicated that the same analysis would extend to the text of the Second Amendment. In United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, the Court held that its analysis of the Constitution “suggests that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment, and by the First and Second Amendments, … refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.” Portillo relies on Verdugo-Urquidez and argues that he has sufficient connections with the United States to be included in this definition of “the people,” but neither this court nor the Supreme Court has held that the Fourth Amendment extends to a native and citizen of another nation who entered and remained in the United States illegally.
Moreover, even if there were precedent for the proposition that illegal aliens generally are covered by the Fourth Amendment, we do not find that the use of “the people” in both the Second and the Fourth Amendment mandates a holding that the two amendments cover exactly the same groups of people. The purposes of the Second and the Fourth Amendment are different. The Second Amendment grants an affirmative right to keep and bear arms, while the Fourth Amendment is at its core a protective right against abuses by the government. Attempts to precisely analogize the scope of these two amendments is misguided, and we find it reasonable that an affirmative right would be extended to fewer groups than would a protective right.
(Note that the dissent makes a persuasive argument, I think, that the “affirmative right” vs. “protective right” distinction isn’t sound; I quote that passage in the material that you can see by clicking the link below.)
The Second Circuit laid out compelling reasons for why an illegal alien could not claim that a predecessor statute to section 922(g)(5) violated the Fifth Amendment right to equal protection by saying that “illegal aliens are those who … are likely to maintain no permanent address in this country, elude detection through an assumed identity, and — already living outside the law — resort to illegal activities to maintain a livelihood.” United States v. Toner, 728 F.2d 115, 128-29 (2d Cir. 1984). The court went on to approvingly quote the district court’s statement that “one seeking to arrange an assassination would be especially eager to hire someone who had little commitment to this nation’s political institutions and who could disappear afterwards without a trace …”
Additionally, the Supreme Court has long held that Congress has the authority to make laws governing the conduct of aliens that would be unconstitutional if made to apply to citizens. In Matthews v. Diaz, the appellees were lawful resident aliens challenging a federal law that limited eligibility to Medicare Part B to aliens who had been admitted for permanent residence and had also resided in the United States for at least five years. 96 S.Ct. 1883 (1976). The Supreme Court upheld both conditions as constitutional against a challenge under the Due Process Clause. The Court pointed out in its opinion that the crucial question was whether discrimination among different types of aliens was permissible, as contrasted with discrimination between aliens and citizens and held that “[n]either the overnight visitor, the unfriendly agent of a hostile foreign power, the resident diplomat, nor the illegal entrant, can advance even a colorable constitutional claim to a share in the bounty that a conscientious sovereign makes available to its own citizens and some of its guests.” The Court went on to say that “[i]n the exercise of its broad power over naturalization and immigration, Congress regularly makes rules that would be unacceptable if applied to citizens.”
The Court, in several cases striking down state laws restricting otherwise lawful activities in which aliens could engage, has emphasized that the rights thus protected were those of aliens who were lawful inhabitants of the states in question….
The courts have made clear that the Constitution does not prohibit Congress from making laws that distinguish between citizens and aliens and between lawful and illegal aliens. We find that analysis persuasive in interpreting the text of the Second Amendment. Whatever else the term means or includes, the phrase “the people” in the Second Amendment of the Constitution does not include aliens illegally in the United States such as Portillo, and we hold that section 922(g)(5) is constitutional under the Second Amendment.
[Footnote: This case does not involve, and we do not speak to, the constitutional trial, personal bodily integrity, privacy or speech rights of illegal aliens; we speak only to whether the Second Amendment precludes Congress from limiting the actual, affirmative conduct of aliens while they are illegally present within this country. This is a pure question of law which the district court has correctly answered.]
But Judge Dennis dissents:
The majority concludes that Portillo-Munoz, a ranch hand who has lived and worked in the United States for more than 18 months, paid rent, and helped supported a family — but who committed the misdemeanor of illegally crossing the border — is not part of “the people.” Supreme Court and Fifth Circuit precedent recognize that the phrase “the people” has the same meaning in the First, Second, and Fourth Amendments. The majority’s determination that Portillo-Munoz is not part of “the people” effectively means that millions of similarly situated residents of the United States are “non-persons” who have no rights to be free from unjustified searches of their homes and bodies and other abuses, nor to peaceably assemble or petition the government. In my view, Portillo-Munoz clearly satisfies the criteria given by the Supreme Court and our court for determining whether he is part of “the people”: he has come to the United States voluntarily and accepted some societal obligations.
Of course, whether 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5) violates the Second Amendment is a separate question from whether Portillo-Munoz is part of “the people” who have First, Second, and Fourth Amendment rights. I would remand for the district court to consider in the first instance the applicable level of scrutiny under the Second Amendment, and whether the provision passes muster under that level of scrutiny. [Footnote: Since District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), courts of appeal have taken various approaches to scrutinizing laws regarding firearms. See, e.g., Nordyke v. King, No. 07-15763, 2011 WL 1632063, at *5 (9th Cir. May 2, 2011) (applying a “substantial burden” test to determine whether to apply heightened scrutiny to county ordinance);United States v. Chester, 628 F.3d 673, 682-83 (4th Cir.2010) (applying intermediate scrutiny to review of § 922(g)(9)); United States v. Reese, 627 F.3d 792, 801-02 (10th Cir.2010) (applying intermediate scrutiny to review of § 922(g)(8)); United States v. Williams, 616 F.3d 685, 692-94 (7th Cir.2010) (applying intermediate scrutiny to review of § 922(g)(1)); United States v. Skoien, 614 F.3d 638, 641-42 (7th Cir.2010) (en banc) (declining to label the level of scrutiny being applied, but upholding § 922(g)(9) because “logic and data establish a
substantial relation between” the subsection and an “important governmental objective”); United States v. Marzzarella, 614 F.3d 85, 96-98 (3d Cir.2010) (applying a sliding scale test to determine the appropriate level of scrutiny for evaluating § 922(k)).] …The majority labels the Second Amendment an “affirmative right” and the Fourth Amendment a “protective right.” This distinction, unfortunately, is unpersuasive. The majority’s characterization of the Second Amendment as an affirmative right is contradicted by Heller: “[I]t has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.'” Both the Second and Fourth Amendments plainly refer to the right of “the people” to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion — whether in the form of unreasonable searches or seizures, or in the form of infringements on the right to bear arms. Moreover, the majority’s reasoning implicates not only the Fourth Amendment, but also the First Amendment, which similarly prohibits Congress from “abridging … the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” …
The sole basis for the majority’s conclusion that Portillo-Munoz should not be considered part of “the people” is that he is unlawfully present in the United States. However, this rationale is wholly unsupported by the applicable precedents.
As the majority acknowledges, Heller did not address the question of whether noncitizens, lawfully or unlawfully present in the United States, have Second Amendment rights. Importantly, in both Heller and Verdugo-Urquidez, a Fourth Amendment case, the Supreme Court indicated that “the people” includes people who have developed “sufficient connection” with the United States…. In Verdugo-Urquidez, the Supreme Court concluded that an alien who was brought to the United States against his will, for the sole purpose of subjecting him to a criminal prosecution, was not entitled to Fourth Amendment protections because he “had no voluntary connection with this country that might place him among ‘the people’ of the United States,” and thus that the warrantless search of his properties by United States government agents in Mexico did not violate the Fourth Amendment. Nothing in Verdugo-Urquidez requires that the alien must be lawfully present in the United States in order to establish substantial connections….