Whether a legislature can cleanse the taint of a racially discriminatory law by silent reenactment or amendment when the law was originally adopted for an impermissible discriminatory purpose

The government prosecuted Juan Carl os Gamez-Salas under a statute with undisputed racist origins. Congress crimi nalized illegal reentry into the United States in 1929 at the urging of “pro ud” white supremacists, nativists, and eugenicists to keep the American bloodline “white and purely Caucasian.” The core focus of the illegal reentry provision has remained substantively the same since 1929. Section 1326 continues to be wielded as a discriminatory tool driving the mass incarceration of Latino people, with 99% of statutory prosecut ions involving LatinAmerican defendants. But the Ninth Circuit upheld the law based on a reenactment in 1952 and amendments in the 1980s and 1990s , none of which grappled with the law’s racist past. This case poses important questions abo ut the role of appellate courts in applying the framework from Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation , 429 U.S. 252 (1977), to a fede ral law used for nearly 20% of all federal criminal prosecutions, alon g with countless civil rights cases. The question presented is: Whether a legislature can cleanse the taint of a racially discriminatory law by silent reenactment or amendment when the law was originally adopted for an impermissible discriminatory purpose. prefix PARTIES ,