Chung Fook v. White

Background

A U.S.-born man sought to bring his wife, a Chinese woman who was not eligible for naturalization, to the United States in 1922. Immigration officials refused her admission and detained her at the immigration station on the ground that she had a contagious disease. She argued she should be admitted without hospital detention under a proviso in section 22 of the Immigration Act of 1917. A federal district court denied her petition for habeas corpus, and the circuit court of appeals affirmed that denial. The court below had said the exemption was meant to apply only to a wife who by marriage had acquired her husband’s citizenship, not to a wife who remained an alien.

Reasoning

The central question was whether the statute’s exemption from detention applied to the wife of any U.S. citizen or only to the wife or minor children of a person who had been naturalized. The Court read the statute’s words literally and held that the proviso plainly extends only to the wife or children of a naturalized citizen. The Court declined to add the words “native-born citizen” to the statute or to rewrite Congress’s text. It said that if the statute’s effect is unjust or discriminatory, the appropriate remedy is action by Congress rather than judicial alteration of clear statutory language.

Real world impact

Under this decision, immigration officials may continue to detain and, when appropriate, hospitalize foreign spouses of native-born citizens who have contagious disease, following the statute’s procedures. The ruling affirms the lower courts’ judgments and leaves any change in treatment to Congress rather than the courts. The Court emphasized that courts must enforce clear statutory language unless it is clearly unconstitutional, and it did not find the proviso unconstitutional here.