The Supreme Court on Tuesday expanded the rights of states to prosecute illegal immigrants who use fake Social Security numbers to obtain a job.
In a 5-4 decision, the court reinstated convictions won by prosecutors in Kansas against three illegal immigrants who used other people’s information when applying for a job, the Wall Street Journal reported.
“In the present cases, there is certainly no suggestion that the Kansas prosecutions frustrated any federal interests,” Justice Samuel Alito said in a written opinion.
Lawyers for the undocumented workers argued the state could not prosecute them because of a federal statute that previously barred prosecution of these individuals based on the information provided on I-9 forms.
Ramiro Garcia, a line cook in Kansas, was arrested and charged in 2012 after he provided another person’s Social Security number on a work authorization form. A state court reversed his conviction on appeal in 2017, citing the federal statue.
Prosecutors appealed the State Court’s ruling, and the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case during this year’s term.
Kansas was backed by the Trump administration and 12 states in arguing that it can prosecute because the same information also appears on state work forms, the New York Times reported.
In his dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the law “reserves to the federal government—and thus takes from the states—the power to prosecute people for misrepresenting material information in an effort to convince their employer that they are authorized to work in this country.”
Breyer was joined in his dissent by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan.
