Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson filed a dissenting opinion, which Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined. Hansen and opponents of the law warned a ruling reversing the Ninth Circuit could put unsuspecting people in the government’s prosecutorial crosshairs, including grandparents who tell their undocumented grandchild to remain in the country or ministers who welcome undocumeted people into their congregations.īarrett, however, said the law doesn’t have the scope Hansen claims, “so it does not produce the horribles he parades.” The Ninth Circuit unanimously vacated his convictions on the charges of encouraging unlawful immigration but left in place those for mail and wire fraud.
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He challenged the relevant law for those charges as violating his free speech rights. In addition to mail and wire fraud, Hansen was convicted in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California of two counts of encouraging or inducing unlawful immigration for private financial gain.
Helaman Hansen was accused of duping hundreds of undocumented immigrants into paying him thousands of dollars with false promises of citizenship if they joined his adult adoption program.
“When words have several plausible definitions, context differentiates among them.”īarrett reasoned that “encourage” and “induce” are terms of art in criminal law that refer to solicitation and facilitation. The law prohibits “encouraging” and “inducing” illegal immigration, words Barrett said the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit insisted Congress used in their ordinary sense.īut the court “should have given specialized meaning a fair shake,” she said. In a 7-2 opinion authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the court on Friday reversed an appellate decision that struck down the provision for being unconstitutionally overbroad and criminalizing speech protected by the First Amendment. A federal law that allows prosecutors to punish people for encouraging illegal immigration is constitutional, the US Supreme Court ruled.
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