Immigration

New Republic -  A federal judge in Kentucky proposed in a judicial opinion this week that the Bill of Rights does not protect more than 50 million immigrants in the United States. Judge Amul Thapar, who serves on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, argued that originalism required him to exclude all noncitizens from the Constitution’s protections.

“Originally understood, neither the First nor Fourth Amendment clearly extends to noncitizens,” he wrote in a concurring and dissenting opinion on Monday. “And, properly read, the Supreme Court’s guidance on these amendments is far from consistent, in part due to the drift of First and Fourth Amendment caselaw from the original public meaning of the text.”

Thapar’s opinion is a train wreck, to put it mildly. Though the case only concerned the scope of the Second Amendment as it applies to undocumented immigrants, the Trump appointee goes far beyond the facts and briefs to forcefully argue that millions of people living lawfully in the United States can be silenced and seized at the government’s whims. To build his case, Thapar commits a series of profound moral and legal errors that disprove his argument altogether.