Afroyim V. Rusk - Opinion of The Court

Opinion of The Court

The Supreme Court ruled in Afroyim's favor in a 5–4 decision issued on May 29, 1967. The opinion of the Court—written by Associate Justice Hugo Black, and joined by Chief Justice Warren and Associate Justices William O. Douglas and Abe Fortas—as well as Associate Justice Brennan, who had been part of the majority in Perez—was grounded in the reasoning Warren had used nine years earlier in his Perez dissent. The court's majority now held that "Congress has no power under the Constitution to divest a person of his United States citizenship absent his voluntary renunciation thereof." Specifically repudiating Perez, the majority of the justices rejected the claim that Congress had any power to revoke citizenship and said that "no such power can be sustained as an implied attribute of sovereignty". Instead, quoting from the Citizenship Clause, Black wrote:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States ... are citizens of the United States...." There is no indication in these words of a fleeting citizenship, good at the moment it is acquired but subject to destruction by the Government at any time. Rather the Amendment can most reasonably be read as defining a citizenship which a citizen keeps unless he voluntarily relinquishes it. Once acquired, this Fourteenth Amendment citizenship was not to be shifted, canceled, or diluted at the will of the Federal Government, the States, or any other governmental unit.

The Court found support for its position in the history of the unratified Titles of Nobility Amendment. The fact that this 1810 proposal had been framed as a constitutional amendment, rather than an ordinary act of Congress, was seen by the majority as showing that, even before the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress did not believe that it had the power to revoke anyone's citizenship. The Court further noted that a proposed 1818 act of Congress would have provided a way for citizens to voluntarily relinquish their citizenship, but opponents had argued that Congress had no authority to provide for expatriation.

Afroyim's counsel had addressed only the foreign voting question and had carefully avoided any direct challenge to the idea that foreign naturalization might legitimately lead to loss of citizenship (a concept which Warren had been willing to accept in his Perez dissent). Nevertheless, the Court's Afroyim ruling went beyond even Warren's earlier position—holding instead that "The very nature of our government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship."