| Litigants: | Kleindienst v. Mandel |
| Arguedate: | April 18 |
| Argueyear: | 1972 |
| Decidedate: | June 29 |
| Decideyear: | 1972 |
| Fullname: | Richard Gordon Kleindienst, Attorney General, et al. v. Ernest Mandel, et al. |
| Usvol: | 408 |
| Uspage: | 753 |
| Parallelcitations: | 92 S.Ct. 2576; 33 L. Ed. 2d 683; 1972 U.S. LEXIS 22 |
| Prior: | Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York |
| Holding: | In the exercise of Congress' plenary power to exclude aliens or prescribe the conditions for their entry into this country, Congress in § 212(a)(28) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 has delegated conditional exercise of this power to the Executive Branch. When the Attorney General decides for a legitimate and bona fide reason not to waive the statutory exclusion of an alien, courts will not look behind his decision or weigh it against the First Amendment interests of those who would personally communicate with the alien. |
| Majority: | Blackmun |
| Joinmajority: | Burger, Stewart, White, Powell, Rehnquist |
| Dissent: | Douglas |
| Dissent2: | Marshall |
| Joindissent2: | Brennan |
| Lawsapplied: | Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, § 212(a)(28) |
Kleindienst v. Mandel, 408 U.S. 753 (1972), was a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which held that the United States Attorney General has the right to refuse somebody's entry to the United States, as he has been empowered to do so in § 212(a)(28) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.
This action was brought to compel Attorney General Richard Kleindienst to grant a temporary nonimmigrant visa to a Belgian journalist and Marxian theoretician whom the American plaintiff-appellees, Ernest Mandel et al., had invited to participate in academic conferences and discussions in the US. The alien had been found ineligible for admission under §§ 212(a)(28)(D) and (G)(v) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, barring those who advocate or publish "the economic, international, and governmental doctrines of world communism." Kleindienst had declined to waive ineligibility as he has the power to do under § 212(d) of the Act, basing his decision on unscheduled activities engaged in by the alien on a previous visit to the United States, when a waiver was granted.
Kleindienst v. Mandel was cited by the 9th Circuit three-judge appeals panel on February 9, 2017, in Washington v. Trump, with regard to an executive order concerning the restriction of immigration from certain stipulated countries. In that case the government relied on language from Mandel that embraces the proposition that "when the Executive exercises immigration authority 'on the basis of a facially legitimate and bona fide reason, the courts will [not] look behind the exercise of that discretion.'" The court instead held that the Mandel Standard involved a "congressionally enumerated standard" and its application to an individual visa application rather than what it considered to be the "President's promulgation of sweeping immigration policy". They concluded that "courts can and do review constitutional challenges to the substance and implementation of immigration policy."[1]
The Supreme Court later relied in part on Kleindienst v. Mandel in upholding the Trump immigration restriction in Trump v. Hawaii (2018), overruling the 9th Circuit.