The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the preferences Native American families and tribes are given under the Indian Child Welfare Act.
“Children need their families. They do,” Kastelic said. “Even if they don’t have perfect families — and no family is perfect.”The Supreme Court heard several lines of argument relating to the constitutionality of ICWA on Wednesday. The argument with the greatest potential to undercut the law was one cited by Paxton in 2019 after the original district court judgeThe tribes argue that their relationship with the United States is a political, and not a racial, one.
“This court is now looking at the question of whether being a tribal citizen is a racial classification, and if so, that could render ICWA unconstitutional under equal protection grounds,” Fort said. “It could also cause real problems for essentially all of Title 25 of the U.S. Code, which is the section of law that governs Indians and Indian tribes.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed to underline that reasoning during Wednesday’s oral arguments, when he told Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone that if Texas’ argument was effective, “there’ll be a lot that would be bitten out of Title 25. We’d be busy for the next many years striking things down.” In Brackeen, the Supreme Court could also make a much more specific ruling, Fort says, having to do with certain provisions of ICWA overstepping the boundaries between the federal and state governments.
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