Carolyn Shapiro: The worst Supreme Court case you’ve never heard of, and what it tells us about Trump’s immigration enforcement

Carolyn Shapiro in this SCOTUSBblog post "The worst Supreme Court case you’ve never heard of, and what it tells us about Trump’s immigration enforcement" looks at the fugitive slave case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania and its relevance to the Trump administration's "mass deportation campaign." "Margaret and Jerry Morgan were at the center of the case. In 1837, the Morgans lived with their children in York County, Pennsylvania. Jerry was a free Black man, and Margaret had always lived as a free Black woman both in Maryland, the slave state where she was born, and in Pennsylvania, a free state, where she later moved with Jerry."

With race-based immigration enforcement across the country, Shapiro writes that

"[w]e are all now seeing the deep flaws of immigration law play out at a new scale, with gleeful brutality, and with unabashed racism. And it turns out that, like many in the 19th century, lots of us don’t like what we are seeing. I offer this parallel not as a Pollyannish prediction of a quick happy ending – which did not happen after Prigg. (The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Dred Scott, and the Civil War were all still to come.) I offer it to point out that blowing whistles when federal agents appear, filming their actions, and offering support to the loved ones of those who have been abducted are acts not only of protest and solidarity, but also of constitutional vision and commitment, much like the constitutional vision and commitment that motivated abolitionists of all races and that led to the Reconstruction Amendments."