In a 6-3 ruling, the reactionary majority of the Supreme Court placed the right to marriage equality squarely on the chopping block. The court held that U.S. citizens have no constitutional right to have their noncitizen spouses enter the United States, so the government doesn’t have to give a reason for excluding them.
Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, noted in dissent that “there is no question that excluding a citizen’s spouse burdens her right to marriage, and that burden requires the Government to provide at least a factual basis for its decision.” They accused the majority of issuing an unnecessarily broad ruling that could be used to strike down the right to same-sex marriage. “The burden will fall most heavily on same-sex couples and others who lack the ability, for legal or financial reasons, to make a home in the noncitizen spouse’s country of origin,” Sotomayor wrote.
U.S. citizen Sandra Muñoz, a celebrated workers’ rights lawyer from Los Angeles, and her Salvadoran husband Luis Asencio-Cordero had lived together for five years in the United States when the government told her that he could no longer reenter the U.S. Although Asencio-Cordero had no criminal record, a consular officer made an unsupported assertion that he planned to engage in “unlawful activity.” Muñoz claims that the government burdened her fundamental right to marriage and thus owed her an explanation of the factual basis for excluding her husband from the U.S.
“The Court’s decision ignores both constitutional principles and basic human decency,” Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of Berkeley Law School and one of Muñoz’s attorneys, told Truthout. “The Supreme Court long has recognized the right to marry as fundamental, but robs the right of meaning by saying for the first time that it does not include the right to be with one’s spouse.” And, Chemerinsky said, “it is cruel for the Court to reject a right of spouses to be together, especially where a visa was denied in an arbitrary and unfounded manner.”
Muñoz married Asencio-Cordero in 2010 and they have a child together. She filed a visa application for her husband in 2015, but since he had entered the U.S.........