Ruling from U.S. Supreme Court means the attempt to ban an illegal immigrant from possessing firearms is unconstitutional, judge concludes.
An illegal immigrant was wrongly banned from possessing guns, according to a recent ruling.
A federal law, 18 U.S.C. § 922, bars illegal immigrants from carrying guns or ammunition. Prosecutors charged Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, the illegal alien, in 2020 after he was found in Chicago carrying a semi-automatic pistol despite “knowing he was an alien illegally and unlawfully in the United States.”
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman rejected two motions to dismiss, but the third motion, based on a 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, triggered the dismissal of the case on March 8.
“The noncitizen possession statute, 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(5), violates the Second Amendment as applied to Carbajal-Flores,” Judge Coleman, appointed under President Barack Obama, wrote in her 8-page ruling. “Thus, the court grants Carbajal-Flores’ motion to dismiss.”
Lawyers for Mr. Carbajal-Flores had argued in the most recent motion to dismiss that the government could not show the law in question was “part of the historical tradition that delimits the outer bounds of the right to keep and bear arms.”
In 2022, the Supreme Court determined that the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment “presumptively protects” conduct that is covered by the amendment’s “plain text.”
To justify regulations, governments must show that each regulation “is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” the high court said at the time. “Only if a firearm regulation is consistent with this nation’s historical tradition may a court conclude that the individual’s conduct falls outside the Second Amendment’s ‘unqualified command.’
“Lifetime disarmament of an individual based on alienage or nationality alone does not have roots in the history and tradition of the United States,” Mr. Carbajal-Flores’ lawyers argued.
They pointed to several rulings interpreting the Supreme Court’s decision, including an appeals court ruling that declared stripping a man convicted of a nonviolent crime or his gun rights was unconstitutional.
The government opposed the motion, noting that neither cited decision applied to illegal immigrants and that the defendant ignored other rulings that did, including a 2023 ruling that found illegal immigrants don’t enjoy Second Amendment rights. The government also offered examples of laws that prohibited certain categories of people from carrying guns, including “individuals who threatened the social order through their untrustworthy adherence to the rule of law.”
But Judge Coleman ruled for the defendant, finding that the laws against untrustworthy people contained exceptions for people who signed loyalty oaths and were deemed nonviolent.
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