Kansas, Petitioner v. Ramiro Garcia; Kansas, Petitioner v. Donaldo Morales; Kansas, Petitioner v. Guadalupe Ochoa-Lara

Summary

The Court held that federal immigration law neither expressly nor impliedly preempts Kansas prosecutions for using another person's Social Security number on tax-withholding forms, even when the same number also appears on an I-9 employment-verification form. It reversed the Kansas Supreme Court's judgments and remanded. Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, concurred, joining the Court's opinion in full while urging abandonment of purposes-and-objectives preemption and expressing skepticism about field preemption. Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan, agreed that express preemption did not apply but dissented from the implied-preemption holding, reasoning that Congress exclusively occupied the field of policing fraud committed to demonstrate federal work authorization.