The US Supreme Court ruled on Friday that citizens do not have a right to have their non-citizen spouses allowed into the country. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for a 6-3 majority that “a citizen does not have a fundamental liberty interest in her noncitizen spouse being admitted to the country” after a US citizen was unable to secure an immigrant visa for her Salvadoran husband.

The case of Department of State et al. v. Muñoz et al. concerned Sandra Muñoz, a US citizen. She attempted to obtain an immigrant visa for her husband, Salvadoran citizen Luis Asencio-Cordero, who had lived in the US for several years. The application was denied based on 8 U.S.C. §1182(a)(3)(A)(ii), which makes a non-citizen inadmissible if the US State Department believes on reasonable grounds that the individual is entering solely to engage in “unlawful activity.” However, this reasoning was only provided after a protracted legal battle.

Typically, migration decisions are non-reviewable under the doctrine of consular non-reviewability. However, Muñoz found success in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by arguing that she had a constitutionally protected interest in her husband’s visa application. This would mean that the doctrine of consular non-reviewability does not apply since the immigration decision concerned a constitutionally protected right. Hence, she argued, the State Department’s failure to provide reasons for their denial in a timely manner was reviewable.

However, the Supreme Court found that there was no violation of Muñoz’s fundamental rights. Justice Coney-Barrett wrote that the right Muñoz claims is “difficult to pin down.” Coney-Barrett surveyed the history of immigration law, stating Congress has “never made spousal immigration a matter of right.” Instead, according to the court, spousal immigration is a privilege that cannot trigger judicial review of an immigration decision.

A dissent by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, criticized the majority’s process. According to the dissent, the majority issued an overly broad decision. While the majority could have found that the State Department’s belated reasoning was sufficient, it instead found that the right to marry and live with one’s spouse is not constitutionally protected. Justice Sotomayor supported the view that marriage is constitutionally protected and that decisions that impact that right must be “facially legitimate and bona fide.”