This Day in Legal History: The Immigration Act of 1882

On August 3, 1882, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Immigration Act of 1882, the first comprehensive federal law regulating immigration into the United States. Before this, immigration had largely been left to the individual states; this Act marked the moment the federal government claimed the subject as its own, and it built the first federal machinery for controlling who could enter the country.

The Act did two enduring things. First, it imposed a “head tax”—fifty cents on every immigrant arriving by ship—to fund the administration of immigration, and it placed enforcement under the Secretary of the Treasury, creating the country’s first federal immigration bureaucracy. Second, and more consequentially for the law that followed, it created categories of people who would be excluded: convicts, the “insane,” and—in language that would echo for the next century and a half—”any person unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” That public-charge concept, born here in 1882, is the same doctrine we discussed just a couple of weeks ago when the current administration revived an expansive version of the public-charge rule.

The significance of August 3, 1882 is that it is the taproot of the entire federal immigration system. Coming just months after the Chinese Exclusion Act, it established the foundational premise that the national government decides the terms of admission to the United States, and it introduced the framework—head taxes, excludable categories, federal enforcement—on which everything since has been built. It’s worth sitting with the tension in the date: 1882 is also, almost exactly, the moment Emma Lazarus was composing “The New Colossus,” with its welcome to the tired and the poor. The law and the poem were born together, and the distance between them—between the statute’s exclusions and the sonnet’s embrace—is a distance the country has been arguing about ever since.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has formally rescinded the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” clearing what had been the biggest obstacle to his confirmation. If you were with us last week, this is the resolution of that story. The fund—created by a Justice Department order back in May—would have used taxpayer money to compensate people who claimed to be victims of the prior administration’s Justice Department, a group that notably included those convicted in connection with the January 6 Capitol attack. Republican Senator John Cornyn had refused to support Blanche’s nomination until the fund was killed, and this week Blanche did exactly that, signing an order declaring the May directive “rescinded” with “no force or effect,” and, as part of the deal, agreeing to limit the related immunity arrangement so it applies only to the IRS and not to other agencies. The significance ties together several threads we’ve followed all summer. This fund grew out of the same collusive IRS settlement that a federal judge voided as a sham, and it sat at the center of concerns about the Justice Department being used to reward the president’s allies. That a senator from the president’s own party forced its formal repeal as the price of confirmation is advice-and-consent working as a genuine check—and it means the incoming attorney general takes office having had to publicly dismantle one of the administration’s most criticized initiatives before the Senate would trust him with the job.

Acting US Attorney General Blanche rescinds ‘anti-weaponization’ fund before confirmation vote | Reuters NPR · NBC News

In a court filing, Capital One has disclosed for the first time that it closed more than 300 Trump Organization bank accounts back in 2021 after an anti-money-laundering review—the first time a bank has formally tied such concerns to its decision to cut off the president’s family business. The context is a lawsuit: the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and Eric Trump sued Capital One in Florida last year, alleging the bank “debanked” them for political reasons, having notified the Trump Organization of the closures in March 2021, just weeks after January 6. Capital One’s filing reframes that story entirely. The bank says its compliance team did precisely what federal regulators expect—flagging accounts that raised anti-money-laundering red flags and acting on them. Here’s the legal machinery underneath. Under the Bank Secrecy Act and related anti-money-laundering rules, banks are legally obligated to monitor their customers, file suspicious-activity reports, and, when warranted, close accounts; failing to do so can expose a bank to serious regulatory penalties. Importantly, Capital One did not accuse the Trump Organization of actual money laundering—flagging a risk and proving a crime are very different things. The significance is that this is a clean collision between two hot legal debates: the “debanking” complaint that financial institutions are dropping customers for political or ideological reasons, and the reality that banks operate under mandatory AML obligations that require them to shed risky accounts. A court will now have to decide which of those framings fits what Capital One actually did.

Capital One says it closed Trump Organization’s accounts after anti-money-laundering review | Reuters CNBC · NPR

Tom Goldstein, the prominent Supreme Court advocate and SCOTUSblog founder we’ve been following, has launched his appeal—asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn his twelve convictions for tax and mortgage fraud and to undo his six-year prison sentence. Recall the case: a jury found that Goldstein concealed millions from a secret high-stakes poker life, diverted his law firm’s fees to cover gambling debts, and lied to mortgage lenders; he was sentenced to 72 months and ordered to pay more than $3 million in restitution. The appeal is a reminder that even a resource-intensive, headline conviction gets a second look, and Goldstein is raising some genuinely lawyerly arguments. The most interesting is venue—the constitutional requirement that a defendant be tried in the right place. His team argues that while prosecutors proved he filled out loan applications in Maryland, they never proved from where he actually transmitted the documents, leaning on a recent Fourth Circuit decision that took venue seriously. He’s also challenging the admission of statements he made in media interviews and the wording of the jury instructions. Commentators describe his path as daunting, and it is—appellate courts rarely overturn convictions, and factual findings get real deference. But the significance is that these are exactly the kinds of technical, procedural issues on which serious appeals are built. Goldstein spent his career winning cases at the top of the appellate system; now he’s testing whether that same system will scrutinize the government’s work in convicting him.

US Supreme Court lawyer Tom Goldstein appeals tax conviction | Reuters Law360 · Bloomberg Law

And finally, the Justice Department has moved to drop its criminal case against David Hearn, the former Olympic canoeist charged with vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool—and the reason is striking. We covered Hearn’s not-guilty plea back in July, when his lawyers called the prosecution an abuse of power built on a “concocted narrative.” It turns out that characterization may have been closer to the truth than the charge. In a 20-page filing, prosecutors acknowledged that evidence received after Hearn was indicted shows the damage to the pool “was the result of flawed installation by the contractor,” compounded by “the rush to complete the project” before the America 250 celebrations around July 4. In other words: not vandalism—shoddy construction. The U.S. Attorney’s office said it only learned of the flawed-installation evidence after a grand jury had already indicted him. The significance goes right to prosecutorial power and its risks. A 67-year-old man was detained for hours and charged with a felony over damage that, by the government’s own admission, he didn’t cause. The case collapsing is the system correcting itself—but only after Hearn spent weeks as a felony defendant. It’s a real-world illustration of a point we keep returning to: the decision to charge is one of the most consequential and least reviewable powers in the legal system, and when it’s exercised on a flawed factual premise, the damage to the person charged is done long before the dismissal.