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Wong Wing v. United States
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued April 1–2, 1896
Decided May 18, 1896
Full case nameWong Wing v. United States
Citations163 U.S. 228 (more)
16 S. Ct. 977; 41 L. Ed. 140; 1896 U.S. LEXIS 2260
Court membership
Chief Justice
Melville Fuller
Associate Justices
Stephen J. Field · John M. Harlan
Horace Gray · David J. Brewer
Henry B. Brown · George Shiras Jr.
Edward D. White · Rufus W. Peckham
Case opinions
MajorityShiras, joined by Harlan, Gray, Brown, White, Peckham
Concur/dissentField
Brewer took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.

Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228 (1896), was a United States Supreme Court case that challenged the constitutionality of section 4 of the Geary Act, an extension and amendment of the Chinese Exclusion Act. The provision at issue stated "Any Chinese person or person of Chinese descent convicted and adjudged to be not lawfully entitled to be or remain in the United States shall be imprisoned at hard labor for a period of not exceeding one year and thereafter removed from the United States."[1] The plaintiffs challenged this section on the ground that it violated Fifth and Sixth Amendments.[2]


In finding for the plaintiff, the Court voided the imprisonment provisions of the Act. They held that detaining or temporarily confining a non-citizen without a jury trial was permissible, so long as that detainment was in service of excluding or expelling the non-citizen, but that imprisonment without a trial as a punishment for violating immigration laws was impermissible. The court ruled that the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, like the Fourteenth Amendment, apply to all persons in the United States, including non-citizens. [2]

The decision in Wong Wing marked the first time the Supreme Court invalidated an immigration statute, the first time the Supreme Court held that the Bill of Rights protected aliens against the federal government, and the first time the Supreme Court ruled that aliens who were unlawfully present in the United States had constitutional rights.[3]

Background[edit]

Wong Wing is one of many cases that were brought by Chinese Americans opposing anti-Chinese legislation. Beginning in the 1850s, anti-Chinese sentiment spread throughout the West Coast, resulting in the passage of discriminatory local and state laws, such as the Foreign Miners' License Law and the Queue Ordinance.[4] In the period following the Civil War, the "Chinese Question" featured heavily in the debates over the Reconstruction Amendments; legislators were unsure whether Chinese immigrants should, like former slaves, be granted citizenship and the right to vote, and ultimately decided against expanding the rights of Chinese Americans.[5]

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which restricted the entry of Chinese immigrants into the U.S., followed by the Geary Act in 1892. The Geary Act authorized the deportation of Chinese people not lawfully present in the U.S., imposed a sentence of hard labor on Chinese people not lawfully present, and required that all Chinese people in the U.S. apply for a certificate of residence. A necessary prerequisite to obtaining the certificate of residence was the affidavit of a credible white witness stating that the person in question had been in residence in the U.S. at the time of the Act's passage.[6]

The Six Companies, a Chinese-American business association in San Francisco, led a coordinated campaign against the Geary Avt, convincing more than eighty-five thousand Chinese laborers, about 87% of the Chinese population, to refuse the Act's mandate to register with the government, or else risk deportation.[7][8] Echoing their previous strategy of bringing thousands of habeas corpus cases in protest of the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Six Companies hoped to use the ensuing arrests to bring cases that would invalidate the Geary Act.[8]

Ultimately, the Supreme Court upheld the deportation provisions of the Geary Act in Fong Yue Ting, although it is worth noting that three judges dissented from that opinion.[9] Faced with the prospect of rounding up and deporting thousands of Chinese laborers, an expensive and burdensome proposition, Congress passed the McCreary Amendment, which extended the registration period.[8]

Case[edit]

In 1892, Wong Wing, Lee Poy, Lee You Tong, and Chan Wah Dong were charged with being Chinese people unlawfully present in the United States. A commissioner for the U.S. Circuit Court in the Eastern District of Michigan found them guilty as charged, and sentenced them to 60 days of hard labor at the Detroit House of Correction, after which they would be deported. The plaintiffs were never indicted by a grand jury, nor were they given a jury trial. The plaintiffs filed a writ of habeas corpus, which was denied. They appealed the denial to the Supreme Court.[2]

Arguments[edit]

Previous cases had decided, largely relying on the doctrine of plenary power, that the U.S. had the right to exclude the Chinese from entering the U.S.,[10] that the U.S. could deport Chinese people unlawfully present in the U.S.,[9] and that it was permissible for the deportation authority to be delegated to executive officers.[11] The plaintiffs argued that, even if all of these actions were constitutional, that enactment of Section 4 of the Geary Act was outside the bounds of Congress's immigration powers.

Section 4 of the Geary Act imposed a sentence of up to a year of hard labor for Chinese people found to be unlawfully present in the United States. Relying on Ex Parte Wilson and Mackin, plaintiffs contended that Section 4 violated the Fifth Amendment's prohibition on punishing people for infamous crimes without an indictment by a grand jury, and failed to live up to the Sixth Amendment's guarantee of trial by jury in criminal cases; Wilson and Mackin had both found that a crime punishable by a term of years at hard labor was an infamous crime.[12] [13]

In response, the government argued that the holdings in Wilson and Mackin did not apply to all offenses punishable by hard labor, as many state supreme courts had found statutes sentencing vagrants to hard labor without a trial to be constitutional on that basis that constitutional protections only attached to common law offenses traditionally considered to be subject to trial by jury. The government argued that unlawful presence in the U.S. was a political offense, not a common law offense, and that the Constitution therefore did not apply.[2]

Holding[edit]

The Court found that it was beyond the scope of Congress's constitutional powers to declare unlawful presence in the U.S. an infamous crime and then impose infamous punishment without a grand jury indictment or a trial, and struck Section 4 of the Geary Act as violating the Fifth and Sixth Amendment. The Court reasoned that to allow the legislature to both define and pass judgement on a crime would be a separation of powers issue. If Congress wished to make unlawful presence a crime, they would have to provide for judicial trials.


Additionally, imposing hard labor, except as punishment for a crime, would violate the Thirteenth Amendment's ban on involuntary servitude. Lastly, the Court refused to accept the government's argument that the Constitution should not apply to aliens unlawfully present in the U.S., instead extending Yick Wo's holding that the Fourteenth Amendment applies to non-citizens to the Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and explicitly to non-citizens not lawfully present in the U.S.


The Court, however, reiterated its finding in Fong Yue Ting that deportation was not punishment. In the Court's estimation, deportation therefore did not raise the same constitutional concerns as a sentence of hard labor.[2]

Detention Provision[edit]

The Court did not rule that it was never permissible to hold an alien in custody, but rather drew a line between imprisonment and detention. The Court reasoned that it would be logistically impossible to deport aliens without detaining them, and also noted that detention was a normal part of any arrest. To declare that all detention was equivalent to imprisonment would therefore pose some serious practical problems for law enforcement. In order to reconcile these concerns, the court found that detention of aliens was permissible so long as it was in service of effecting their deportation.[2]

Concurrence[edit]

Justice Field's concurrence in Wong Wing was the last opinion of his career.[3] While the concurrence is introduced as "concurring in part and dissenting in part" Justice Field in fact concurred entirely with his colleagues' opinion, and dissented from the arguments made in the case, saying:

"But I do not concur but dissent entirely from what seemed to me to be harsh and illegal assertions, made by counsel of the government, on the argument of this case, as to the right of the court to deny to the accused the full protection of the law and constitution against every form of oppression and cruelty to them.[2]"

Justice Field strongly disagreed with the government's argument in the case, which had proposed that aliens who entered the country unlawfully might not have any Constitutional protections.[3]

Relation to Other Cases[edit]

Challenges to Anti-Chinese Legislation[edit]

Other important challenges to Anti-Chinese Legislation include:

Progeny[edit]

Modern Significance[edit]

Wong Wing prevented an early merger of criminal and immigration law,[14] which remain distinct, though increasingly interrelated, fields.[15] However, it also authorized administrative detention, and implied that this type of detention was not subject to the constitutional limitations on the criminal system.[14] The system of detention authorized in Wong Wing has since grown tremendously, and is a subject of controversy in the media, as well as the courts.[16] [17]

Scholar Daniel Kanstroom argues that Wong Wing is an early iteration of a broader question that the courts are still wrestling with today. In cases like Padilla v. Kentucky, the courts have had to decide when constitutional protections, similar to those available to criminal defendants, attach to enforcement mechanisms for civil deportation procedures.[18] In Wong Wing, the court could have decided that since the hard labor sentence was a component of a deportation proceeding, that the 5th and 6th Amendments did not apply. Similarly, in Padilla v. Kentucky, the court could have decided, and Justice Scalia argued, that since the deportation consequence of Padilla's guilty plea was civil in nature, Strickland protections did not apply.[19]

References[edit]

  1. ^ The Geary Act 52 Cong. Ch. 60, May 5, 1892, 27 Stat. 25
  2. ^ a b c d e f g "Wong Wing v. United States, 163 U.S. 228 (1896)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-05-13.
  3. ^ a b c Neuman, Gabriel (2005). Wong Wing v. United States: The Bill of Rights Protects Illegal Aliens. p. 31. ISBN 9781587788734. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  4. ^ Kanazawa, Mark (2005). "Immigration, Exclusion, and Taxation: Anti-Chinese Legislation in Gold Rush California". The Journal of Economic History. 65 (3): 779–805.
  5. ^ Aarim-Heriot, Najia (2006). Chinese immigrants, African Americans, and racial anxiety in the United States, 1848-82 (1st Illinois pbk. ed ed.). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. p. 100. ISBN 0252073517. OCLC 67876508. {{cite book}}: |edition= has extra text (help)
  6. ^ Geary Act, 27 Stat. 25. https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1892GearyAct.pdf
  7. ^ Yin, Paul (2012). "The Narratives of Chinese-American Litigation During the Chinese Exclusion Era". Asian American Law Journal. 19: 153 – via Westlaw.
  8. ^ a b c Katz, Ellen D. (1995). "The Six Companies and the Geary Act: A Case Study in Nineteenth-Century Civil Disobedience and Civil Rights Litigation". Western Legal History. 8: 227–72 – via HeinOnline.
  9. ^ a b "Fong Yue Ting v. United States, 149 U.S. 698 (1893)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
  10. ^ "CHAE CHAN PING v. UNITED STATES". LII / Legal Information Institute. Retrieved 2018-05-31.
  11. ^ "Lem Moon Sing v. United States, 158 U.S. 538 (1895)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-06-01.
  12. ^ "Ex Parte Wilson, 114 U.S. 417 (1885)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-06-01.
  13. ^ "Mackin v. United States, 117 U.S. 348 (1886)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-06-01.
  14. ^ a b Jennifer M. Chacón, Unsettling History City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. by Kelly Lytle Hernández. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press. 2017. Pp. 301. 131 Harv. L. Rev. 1078, 1090 (2018)
  15. ^ Stumpf, Julie. "The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, And Sovereign Power". American University Law Review. 56: 367.
  16. ^ Fialho, Christina. "Immigration detention in the United States denies basic human freedoms". latimes.com. Retrieved 2018-06-01.
  17. ^ "Jennings v. Rodriguez, 583 U.S. ___ (2018)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-06-01.
  18. ^ Kanstroom, Daniel (2011). "The Right to Deportation Counsel in Padilla v. Kentucky: The Challenging Construction of the Fifth-and-A-Half Amendment". UCLA Law Review. 58: 1461–1507.
  19. ^ "Padilla v. Kentucky, 559 U.S. 356 (2010)". Justia Law. Retrieved 2018-06-01.

External links[edit]

[[Category:United States Supreme Court cases]] [[Category:Chinese-American history]] [[Category:United States Supreme Court cases of the Fuller Court]] [[Category:Asian-American culture in Metro Detroit]] [[Category:History of Detroit]] [[Category:United States immigration law]] [[Category:United States due process case law]] {{SCOTUS-stub}}

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