The Fourth Amendment and Privacy Implications of Interior Immigration Enforcement
The Fourth Amendment and Privacy Implications of Interior Immigration Enforcement Anil Kalhan* This Article proposes privacy as a descriptive and normative framework to analyze the constellation of recent initiatives to expand interior enforcement of federal immigration laws. By expanding the circumstances in which individuals are expected to demonstrate their lawful presence in the United States, these various initiatives seek to transform the significance of immigration and citizenship status in day-to-day life from something largely invisible and irrelevant to something visible and salient in a variety of settings. This transformation, however, carries underappreciated social costs. Building upon scholarship theorizing privacy as protecting a set of social or structural interests, and using the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Katz v. United States as a conceptual starting point, the Article argues that recognizing and protecting immigration and citizenship status privacy in certain contexts serves valuable social purposes. While the Fourth Amendment itself may ultimately establish a weak constraint against interior enforcement, in other contexts courts and state and local governments have increasingly recognized and protected privacy interests in immigration and citizenship * Visiting Assistant Professor, Fordham Law School. A.B., Brown University; M.P.P.M., Yale School of Management; J.D., Yale Law School. I am grateful to Tim Casey, Jennifer Chacón, Sherry Colb, Michael Dorf, Hiroshi Motomura, Alison Nathan, Smita Narula, Jayashri Srikantiah, Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia, Verity Winship, and Michael Wishnie for helpful conversations and reviews of earlier drafts, to Meagan Crowley and Ashok Mathai for their dedicated research assistance, and to Kirin Gill and the UC Davis Law Review staff for their excellent editorial work.
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