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 Samuel Ma teo-Martinez under a statute with undisputed racist origins. Congress crimina lized illegal entry, as well as illegal reentry, into the United States in 1929 at the urging of “proud” white supremacists, nativists, and eugenicists to keep th e American bloodline “white and purely Caucasian.” The core focus of these provis ions has remained substantively the same since 1929. 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 fe deral law used for a large swath of federal criminal prosecutions, al ong 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 ,