Constitutional Rights

            The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday is the “rights” that are not in the Constitution. Liberals tried to convince everyone in their fight against President Trump that people who had never been in America had a Constitutional “right” to come here. There is no such right listed in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

            Nate Madden at Conservative Review explains another right that is not a real “right.” In a 2001 case before the Supreme Court – Zadvydas v. Davis – concerned how long an illegal alien can be detained. The Court ruled 5-4 that undocumented immigrants could not be held more than 90 days. This sort of created a “right” for the alien to be released back into the general population. Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissent the vote, and Scalia wrote the following dissent.

    Insofar as a claimed legal right to release into this country is concerned.

    An alien under final order of removal stands on an equal footing with an inadmissible alien at the threshold of entry: He has no such right.

    We are offered no justification why an alien under a valid and final order of removal – which has totally extinguished whatever right to presence in this country he possessed – has any greater due process right to be released into the country than an alien at the border seeking entry.

   [A]n inadmissible alien at the border has no right to be in the United States.

            Justice Scalia, joined by Justice Frankfurter, used a dissent from Justice Robert Jackson in Shaughnessy v. United States in 1953: “Due process does not invest any alien with a right to enter the United States nor confer on those admitted the right to remain against the national will.

Nothing in the Constitution requires admission or sufferance of aliens hostile to our scheme of government.”

            All people have the right to be treated with respect as human beings, but they have no fundamental or Constitutional right to enter America or to stay here without permission.