This sounds like Drumpf logic here, where the funds of foreign nationals can be seized.....
Given this record, it is not surprising that many members of
the general public presume that noncitizens do not deserve the
same rights as citizens. II But the presumption is wrong in many
more respects than it is right. While some distinctions between
foreign nationals and citizens are normatively justified and consistent
with constitutional and international law, most are not.
The significance of the citizen/noncitizen distinction is more
often presumed than carefully examined. Upon examination,
there is far less to the distinction than commonly thought. In
particular, foreign nationals are generally entitled to the equal
protection of the laws, to political freedoms of speech and association,
and to due process requirements of fair procedure where
their lives, liberty, or property are at stake.
..............
A third argument commonly heard as a rationale for affording
noncitizens less robust rights protection maintains that because
noncitizens are only "guests"72 who have "come at the
Nation's invitation,'>73 their admission and continuing presence
may be conditioned on whatever constraints the government
chooses to impose. As the Supreme Court once put it, deportation
"is simply a refusal by the Government to harbor persons
whom it does not want. ,,74 If you don't like it, the argument
goes, either don't come, or get out. This argument seeks to transform
what we generally think of as inalienable rights into discretionary
privileges that can be granted or denied at will. It uses
the fact that a foreign national's entry is a privilege to recast re-
strictions on his or her rights here as conditions on the privilege
of entry.
This argument proves too much. It would negate virtually
all constitutional rights of noncitizens, and relegate an entire
class of the populace to a wholly unprotected status. A law mandating
detention of all noncitizens who marry noncitizens of
other races, for example, would be immune from due process,
privacy, and equal protection challenges because it could be defended
as a mere condition on noncitizens' entry. The Supreme
Court has rejected such reasoning, in the immigration area and
elsewhere, precisely because it would allow the government to
achieve indirectly, by attaching conditions to benefits, what it
cannot achieve directly. As the Court stated in 1971 in a case
involving noncitizen rights, "this Court has now rejected the concept
that constitutional rights turn upon whether a governmental
benefit is characterized as a 'right' or as a 'privilege."'7s Under
contemporary constitutional law, equal protection prohibits invidious
discrimination in the allocation of benefits as well as of
rights, and the Court's "unconstitutional conditions" doctrine
provides that the government acts unconstitutionally when even
wholly discretionary benefits are denied because of the recipient's
exercise of constitutional rights.76 Thus, the right-privilege
distinction does not justify a denial of immigrants' rights.
http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1302&context=facpub
