The Supreme Court refused to consider whether a 1978 law that gave precedence to Native families for the adoption of Native children discriminated against non-Native families and upheld the legislation’s constitutionality on Thursday. The law’s goal was to stop the widespread removal of Native American children from their homes.

A 7-2 majority directed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to write the judgement. Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, two justices, disagreed.

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Thousands of Native American children were taken from their homes by adoption agencies and placed with non-Native families or in boarding schools prior to Congress passing the Indian Child Welfare Act. The bill included a provision that provided preference to Native families when adopting Native children.

However, non-Native families that desired to adopt Native American children contested the regulation, claiming that their choice was racist and infringed on the 14th Amendment. Along with the Biden administration, leaders of several of the most well-known tribes in the country stated that the requirements of the statute were founded on the reality that Native American tribes are autonomous entities rather than racial considerations.

The majority decided that the case’s parties lacked the authority to assert their claim of equal protection. According to Barrett, Congress had every right to impose additional rules on states as they typically have the power to handle child custody disputes on their own without federal involvement.

“Congress’s power to legislate with respect to Indians is well established and broad,” Barrett wrote for the majority. The argument from non-Native families that the federal government rarely touches on state family law and so shouldn’t have done with the Native law, she wrote, was a “non-starter.”

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Thomas, in his dissent, said the majority “ignored the normal limits on the federal government’s power.” When Congress has “so clearly intruded upon a longstanding domain of exclusive state power, we must ask not whether a constitutional provision prohibits that intrusion, but whether a constitutional provision authorizes it.”

The majority decided that the case’s parties lacked the authority to assert their claim of equal protection. According to Barrett, Congress had every right to impose additional rules on states as they typically have the power to handle child custody disputes on their own without federal involvement.

Along with Chief Justice John Roberts, conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and the court’s three liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Barrett was one of the four who joined the court’s decision.

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The appeal comes after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit issued a very divided judgement that was evenly divided on a number of the law’s provisions. The outcome upheld the ruling by a federal district judge that certain parts of the law are unconstitutional.

The Indian Child Welfare Act has occasionally caused unforeseen divisions within the Supreme Court. A 3-year-old girl’s non-Native adoptive parents won a 2013 5-4 majority decision despite a claim made by her biological father, a Cherokee Nation member who had opposed to the adoption after the fact. The court decided that a noncustodial parent may not use the provision, according to an opinion written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito.