The Ghost of Chae Chan Ping

I haven’t been able to find out when or where Chae Chan Ping died. American history records that this Chinese laborer was expelled from the United States—despite a written promise from the U.S. government that he would not be—on September 1, 1889. After that, he vanished. But his ghost haunts American immigration law, and the U.S. Supreme Court, more than 125 years later.

As Michael Kagan of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Law pointed out in a recent article in the Nevada Law Journal Forum, Chae’s ghost most recently reappeared with the advent of President Trump’s travel ban.

In fact, Chae Chan Ping is now a ghost within a ghost, since the ban itself has taken on a kind of spectral quality, the Flying Dutchman of constitutional law—withdrawn once, rewritten twice, enjoined three times by lower courts, at least temporarily revived in December by the Supreme Court; it remains in the strange legal bardo between life and death. The Supreme Court has allowed it to go into effect before it hears the final appeals; on Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to review the Ninth Circuit’s latest decision striking down the third iteration of the ban. (As of this writing, the Fourth Circuit has not rendered its ruling in the companion case.)