OAN’s Brooke Mallory
1:18 PM – Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Earlier this month, a U.S. District Court judge declared that it is “unconstitutional” to exclude illegal immigrants from owning firearms, citing the Second Amendment.
District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, who was appointed by former Democrat President Barack Obama, rendered a decision on March 8th in the case of Heriberto Carbajal-Flores, a man who previously entered the U.S. illegally.
Title 18 of the United States Criminal Code forbids illegals from owning weapons, which was the basis for Carbajal-Flores’ charges.
“Lifetime disarmament of an individual based on alienage or nationality alone does not have roots in the history and tradition of the United States,” attorneys for Carbajal-Flores claimed.
Since Carbajal-Flores had no criminal history of specifically mishandling a firearm, the judge said that he did not pose a risk to the public while using “his Second Amendment rights” in Chicago on June 1, 2020.
“Carbajal-Flores contends that he received and used the handgun solely for self-protection and protection of property during a time of documented civil unrest in the spring of 2020,” the judge stated. “Thus, this Court finds that, as applied to Carbajal-Flores, [Title 18] is unconstitutional.”
The Supreme Court’s judgment in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case, which ruled that New York State could not legally forbid anybody from carrying a firearm in public, was cited by Coleman in her opinion.
The case will be “establishing a framework for analyzing whether a challenged firearm regulation violates the Second Amendment,” said a spokesperson for the case.
“The noncitizen possession statute, [Title 18], violates the Second Amendment as applied to Carbajal-Flores,” the judge wrote. “Thus, the Court grants Carbajal-Flores’ motion to dismiss.”
Recently, another federal judge in Washington dismissed a challenge to a law that permits lawsuits against gun manufacturers for inappropriate use of their firearms earlier this month.
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