The 1952 law by which the Trump administration seeks to deport Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who helped organize protests at Columbia University, is largely untested, but it was ruled unconstitutional in 1996 by President Trump’s sister. Trump does not have much use for many judges, but he . held his sister, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, in high regard. “I will never forget the many times people would come up to me and say, ‘Your sister was the smartest person on the Court,’” he said when she died in 2023.
When Barry considered the 1952 law, which the Trump administration has said will play a major role in its deportation plans, she asked whether it could be squared with the Constitution. “The answer,” she wrote, “is a ringing ‘no,’” reports the New York Times.
Barry was a federal trial judge, and so her ruling did not establish a precedent binding on other courts. An appeals court later reversed her decision on grounds unrelated to its substance. It remains the most thorough judicial examination of the constitutionality of the law. The case involved Mario Ruiz Massieu, a former Mexican official whom the Clinton administration sought to deport to Mexico. The secretary of state at the time, Warren Christopher, told Ruiz Massieu the same thing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Khalil: “Your presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” The law, Barry wrote, “confers upon a single individual, the secretary of state, the unfettered and unreviewable discretion to deport any alien lawfully within the United States” if “that person’s mere presence here would impact in some unexplained way on the foreign policy interests of the United States.”