Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2000
Abstract
The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee decision (American-Arab or AADC) is the most recent U.S. Supreme Court pronouncement regarding the intersection of immigration regulations and fundamental constitutional rights enjoyed by foreign subjects present within the United States. In American-Arab, the U.S. government commenced deportation proceedings against two legal permanent residents and six temporary visa holders on the basis of an ideological bias: the plaintiffs were alleged to be members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (Popular Front or PFLP) -- a charge all the plaintiffs denied. The Supreme Court's ruling endorsing the legality of the government's deportation actions wholly eviscerated non-citizens' First Amendment rights. This decision departed from the domestic trend of granting foreigners -- both legally and illegally present within the United States -- constitutional protections, particularly in First Amendment cases.
This Article suggests that the American-Arab holding is a draconian nativistic assault on the rights of foreigners -- rights that are separately and independently protected by international human rights norms, which the Supreme Court simply ignored in rendering its ill-founded decision.
Recommended Citation
Berta E. Hernández-Truyol, Nativism, Terrorism, and Human Rights -- The Global Wrongs of Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, 31 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 521 (2000), available at http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/facultypub/191