SCOTUSblog by Pratheepan Gulasekaram 10/9/2019
In Kansas v. Garcia, the state of Kansas appeals the Kansas Supreme Court’s ruling that the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act preempts the state’s prosecution, under state identity- and information-theft statutes, of three unauthorized noncitizens who used stolen social security numbers to gain employment. As with other recent immigration federalism cases, Garcia acutely presents the conflict between states interested in immigration enforcement and a federal statutory scheme that conceives of the federal government as the primary, if not sole, enforcer of immigration law.
Since IRCA’s enactment in 1986, the “I-9†procedure it sets out for verification of work authorization is now familiar to anyone, citizen or noncitizen, who has ever been employed in the United States. Although IRCA requires employees to present documentation of their legal eligibility to work, penalties under the act are primarily directed against employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers. The act also provides for civil penalties against unauthorized employees and for federal prosecution when employees commit fraud in connection with the verification process.
By enacting this federal scheme, Congress preempted several state laws prohibiting unauthorized employment. In addition, IRCA includes a provision restricting the use of I-9 information for law-enforcement purposes. Specifically, Section 1324a(b)(5) of the statute provides that such a form “and any information contained in, or appended†to it “may not be used for purposes other than for enforcement of†IRCA itself or specific federal crimes related to false statements, fraud, misuse of visas and other immigration documents, and perjury.
In the face of IRCA’s limitation, Kansas, in the course of this litigation, abandoned its reliance on the I-9. Instead, the state based its prosecutions on identity information entered on federal and state tax-withholding documents (the W-4 and K-4 forms, respectively). The noncitizens subject to prosecution argued that the fraudulent social-security information entered on the tax-withholding forms was the same as that entered on the I-9, and that the tax-withholding forms were part of the same employment-verification process for which the I-9 was used. They maintained that the text, purpose and structure of IRCA therefore preempted Kansas from prosecuting them under its identity-theft law.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2019/10/argument-preview-preemption-of-state-identity-theft-prosecutions-of-noncitizens/
