Garreth W. McCrudden (Stanford Law School) has posted Muñoz’s Children (61 Ga. L. Rev., forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
When the government denies a noncitizen’s visa application, can federal judges review that decision? For fifty years, the answer to that question was “sometimes.” Though most visa denials were unreviewable, courts understood U.S. citizens to be entitled to certain procedural protections whenever a visa denial implicated their own fundamental liberty interests. But in Department of State v. Muñoz, decided in 2024, the Supreme Court upended that precedent, throwing into question whether the government is ever constitutionally required to justify its decision to deny a visa.
This Article resolves that uncertainty for two groups: citizen parents with noncitizen children, and citizen children with noncitizen parents. Drawing on more than a century of precedent, it argues that citizen parents and children retain constitutionally protected interests in their relatives’ visa adjudications. It further argues that these interests entitle the citizen parent or child to a facially legitimate and bona fide reason for the visa denial. Making these arguments has become urgent. In May 2026, the Trump administration announced a new policy directing virtually all noncitizens seeking to become permanent residents to leave the country and apply for a visa at a U.S. consulate or embassy abroad. That policy risks pushing hundreds of thousands of families each year into the reach of Muñoz, under which no citizen could challenge the government’s decision to deny a visa. This Article explains why the Constitution demands more, even as the Trump administration mounts new barriers to legal migration.
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