WASHINGTON — A mostly Democratic group of lawmakers are among those launching a renewed push for the Justice Department to condemn racist Supreme Court rulings from a century ago that shaped a legal landscape in which people living in U.S. territories were essentially treated as second-class citizens.
Civil rights groups and professional legal associations are also joining the effort targeting the so-called Insular Cases, beginning with a letter sent to the Attorney General Merrick Garland this week.
Members of both the House and the Senate will also hold a news conference Wednesday to bring attention to the issue.
Among the 43 lawmakers signing the new letter are Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., the ranking member of House Judiciary Committee.
“Today, the Department of Justice has the opportunity to redress this historic error by unequivocally rejecting the discriminatory and racist doctrine of territorial incorporation established by the Insular Cases,” the lawmakers wrote in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News.
Two Republicans who serve as their territories’ delegates in Congress, James Moylan of Guam and Jenniffer González-Colón of Puerto Rico, also signed on. The other signers are all Democrats.
The Insular Cases were a series of rulings issued in the 1900s, soon after the U.S. had acquired Puerto Rico and other territories, in which the court said people in those jurisdictions did not have all the constitutional rights of those living in the mainland.
Justice Henry Billings Brown referred to territories in a 1901 case as lands “inhabited by alien races” who might not abide by “Anglo-Saxon principles.” Five years earlier, Brown had authored the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, which endorsed racial segregation.
In a separate opinion in the 1901 case, Justice Edward Douglass White said the U.S. had the right to acquire “an unknown island, peopled with an…
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