Tuan Anh Nguyen and Joseph Boulais v. Immigration and Naturalization Service (533 U.S. 53)
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 11, 2001 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Citation
- 533 U.S. 53 · 121 S. Ct. 2053
- Decided
- June 11, 2001
- Term
- October Term 2000
- Vote
- 5–4
- Majority author
- Justice Kennedy
- Issue area
- Civil Rights
- Disposition
- Affirmed
- Outcome
- Petitioning party lost
- Ideological direction
- Conservative
Opinion excerpt
Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court. This case presents a question not resolved by a majority of the Court in a case before us three Terms ago. See Miller v. Albright, 523 U. S. 420 (1998). Title 8 U. S. C. § 1409 governs the acquisition of United States citizenship by persons born to one United States citizen parent and one noncitizen parent when the parents are unmarried and the child is born outside of the United States or its possessions. The statute imposes different requirements for the child’s acquisition of citizenship depending upon whether the citizen parent is the mother or the father. The question before us is whether the statutory distinction is consistent with the equal protection guarantee embedded in the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. I Petitioner Tuan Anh Nguyen was born in Saigon, Vietnam, on September 11, 1969, to copetitioner Joseph Boulais and a Vietnamese citizen. Boulais and Nguyen’s mother were not married. Boulais always has been a citizen of the United States, and he was in Vietnam under the employ of a corporation. After he and Nguyen’s mother ended their relationship, Nguyen lived for a time with the family of Boulais’ new Vietnamese girlfriend. In June 1975, Nguyen, then almost six years of age, came to the United States. He became a lawful permanent resident and was raised in Texas by Boulais. In 1992, when Nguyen was…
Excerpt of a 33,772-character opinion. The full text and citation network load in the interactive viewer above.