Tag Archives: Birthright citizenship in the United States

One Aspect Of Birthright Citizen That I Haven’t Heard From The Supreme Court

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Certain words have legal definitions. One of those words in the Fourteenth Amendment has not yet been mentioned (to my knowledge) in the debate over birthright citizenship.

On Monday, The Federalist reported:

This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the most consequential immigration case in decades. The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of a Honduran national challenging President Trump’s executive order denying citizenship to children born to illegal immigrants and tourists with temporary visas. The question posed was whether the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause guarantees automatic citizenship to every child born on American soil, no matter who the parents are or why they are in the United States.

The article notes:

Much of the debate has focused on whether a child is “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. But one word in the Citizenship Clause has largely escaped scrutiny: reside.

Here is the clause in full:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Perhaps because it comes at the end, it has been treated as an afterthought, but careful reading shows how central the term “reside” is. The clause does not say “are born,” “are physically present,” or “pass through on a tourist visa.” Citizenship is granted only to those who actually “reside,” establishing a precondition for the clause’s application, with “reside” carrying a consistent legal meaning across many areas of American law, including taxes, jury duty, voting, school enrollment, in-state tuition, and family law. It refers to an established, settled presence, in other words, a place where you actually live.

The article concludes:

Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito will almost certainly follow the text. They have the intellectual consistency to apply the plain meaning of the clause, certainly with respect to birth tourists who do not “reside” in the United States, and likely to illegal immigrants as well.

The remaining four, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, are in play, and no matter how much one tries to read the tea leaves, we do not know what they will do.

Whatever the outcome, at a minimum, the court should acknowledge that birth tourism is not covered by the 14th Amendment. All it takes is reading one sentence to the end and applying a word everyone understands. If the court cannot hold that line, if five justices cannot agree that a tourist is not a resident, then the words of the Constitution mean nothing.

The outcome of this case will play a major role in determining what our country looks like in eighteen years. Many of the babies that are American citizens because of Chinese birth tourism will be coming to America to establish their right to vote and voting per their instructions from the Chinese Communist part. That does not bode well.

Food For Thought

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On Friday, The Daily Wire posted an article about the recent attempt to explode an IED at MacDill Air Force Base Visitor’s Center in Tampa.

The article reports:

A man and a woman who entered the United States illegally three decades ago were arrested by the Department of Homeland Security after their children brought an explosive device to a military base, The Daily Wire can first report.

Qiu Qin Zou and Jia Zhang Zheng illegally entered the United States in the ’90s, were denied asylum, but remained in the country for several decades, The Daily Wire has learned. They had two children as they illegally resided in the country — Ann Mary Zheng and Alen Zheng.

Last week, the Department of Justice charged 27-year-old Ann Zheng with her part in attempting to explode an IED at MacDill Air Force Base Visitor’s Center in Tampa.  She was arrested as she returned to the United States from China, where authorities believe her brother remains.

DHS arrested the duo’s parents on March 18 for illegal entry.

Qiu Qin Zou and Jia Zhang Zheng remain in ICE custody. They had applied for asylum in 1993 but their applications were denied by an immigration judge, who ordered their removal from the U.S. in 1998. DHS says that the Board of Immigration Appeals repeatedly denied their attempts to have their case reopened. Despite this, they remained in the United States for decades.

The arrests come as the Supreme Court mulls President Donald Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship.

“Automatically granting citizenship to children of illegal aliens born in the U.S. is based on a historically inaccurate interpretation of the Citizenship Clause and poses a major national security risk,” argued Acting Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis.

“That reality became apparent last week when two U.S.-born children of Chinese illegal aliens were indicted for planting a potentially deadly explosive device outside MacDill Air Force Base in Florida,” Bis explained. “This incident underscores the severe national security threat that illegal immigration and birthright citizenship pose to the United States.”

Under the current interpretation of birthright citizenship, Ann Mary Zheng is an American citizen. How many other people who were born in America due to ‘birth tourism’ are here with loyalties to countries that seek to destroy America?

Sometimes the best argument for changing a law is the consequences of that law.

Slowing Down The Lawfare

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One of the political left’s preferred methods of blocking President Trump and his agenda is lawfare. The deep state raided his house, arrested him, posted a mugshot, and generally tried to use questionable legal tactics to stop him from becoming President. When that didn’t work, they enlisted the aid of some liberal district court judges to counter his agenda. Well, that may be coming to an end.

On Friday, Townhall reported:

In a 6-3 decision Friday, the Supreme Court ruled President Donald Trump’s efforts to end “birthright” citizenship are constitutional, overruling rogue judges issuing national injunctions. As explained by our friends at RedState, “the court has issued an opinion in CASA v. Trump, which is actually three consolidated cases involving challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order regarding birthright citizenship.” 

“Universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts. The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue,” the decision states, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett.

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” she continued. “The Court today puts an end to the ‘increasingly common’ practice of federal courts issuing universal injunctions.”

President Trump is the duly elected President of the United States–district court judges cannot supersede his authority.

Let the MAGA agenda proceed!

The End Of Nationwide Injunctions?

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On Monday, Hot Air posted an article about a case the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing on Thursday.

The article notes how the political opponents of President Trump have repeatedly used the courts to try to prevent him from implementing his agenda:

Since President Trump took office, federal district courts have issued 37 nationwide injunctions against the Executive Branch.  That’s more than one a month.  By comparison, during President Obama’s first two years, district courts issued two nationwide injunctions against the Executive Branch, both of which were vacated by the Ninth Circuit.  And according to the Department’s best estimates, courts issued only 27 nationwide injunctions­ in all of the 20th century.

Some say this proves that the Trump Administration is lawless.  Not surprisingly, I disagree.  And I would point out that the only case litigated on the merits in the Supreme Court—the so-called “travel ban” challenge—ended with President’s policy being upheld…

The Constitution empowers Congress to create lower federal courts, and in designing a system of 93 judicial districts and 12 regional circuits, Congress set clear geographic limits on lower-court jurisdiction. In our system, district-court rulings do not bind other judges, even other judges in the same district…

Nationwide injunctions not only allow district courts to wield unprecedented power, they also allow district courts to wield it asymmetrically. When a court denies a nationwide injunction, the decision does not affect other cases. But when a court grants a nationwide injunction, it renders all other litigation on the issue largely irrelevant. Think about what that means for the Government. When Congress passes a statute or the President implements a policy that is challenged in multiple courts, the Government has to run the table—we must win every case. The challengers, however, must find only one district judge—out of an available 600—willing to enter a nationwide injunction. One judge can, in effect, cancel the policy with the stroke of the pen.

The article reports:

And the era of nationwide injunctions could come to an end later this week when the Supreme Court hears a case on birthright citizenship. The case probably won’t decide whether birthright citizenship is legal under the 14th Amendment. What the case is really about is the nationwide injunctions different courts have used to block Trump’s executive order on the topic.

I firmly believe that one of the things President Trump is trying to do is to bring America back to the country our Founding Fathers created. We have wandered so far from our Constitution that the road back is going to be bumpy and clogged by people who are making too much money the way things currently are. It would be wonderful if President Trump could bring us closer to the system of government our Constitution created.

The Lawsuit Filed Against The Effort To End Birthright Citizenship

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On Friday, The Daily Signal posted an article about the lawsuit that has been filed to stop President Trump from ending birthright citizenship. In recent years, birthright citizenship has been the camel’s nose under the tent to allow children of other nations to attend colleges here and to pave a way for their parents to come here legally through chain migration.

The article lists four of the problems with the lawsuit against ending the practice:

 

Error #1: The citizenship clause merely adopted the pre-Dred Scott common law rule that everyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen.

In 1856, the Supreme Court held in the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford that the U.S.-born descendants of African slaves were not and could never become citizens, even though under the traditional common law rule, a person automatically became a citizen of the nation on whose soil he or she was born. The plaintiffs contend that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was intended to restore this earlier common law rule of universal birthright citizenship.

They support this claim with a single, highly edited quotation from Sen. Jacob Howard, a Republican from Michigan, who was instrumental in drafting the citizenship clause: “This amendment … is simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is … a citizen of the United States.”

Error #2: This is an unprecedented action—the executive branch has long recognized that it can’t deny citizenship to children based on the immigration or citizenship status of their parents.

This assertion is only true if history begins in the first half of the 20th century. Unfortunately for the plaintiffs, it doesn’t. In the decades following the ratification of the 14th Amendment, the federal government regularly articulated a view of the citizenship clause that’s remarkably similar to that espoused in Trump’s order, and the executive branch issued citizenship documents accordingly.

Error #3: The Supreme Court confirmed in Wong Kim Ark that the citizenship clause automatically bestows citizenship on the U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents.

Contrary to popular assertions, this is not what the Supreme Court held in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark v. United States. The question decided by the court in that case was far narrower: whether a child born in the U.S. to lawfully present and permanently domiciled immigrant parents was a U.S. citizen. And the court concluded that, indeed, the U.S.-born child of this narrow and specific subset of noncitizen parents is a citizen.

Error #4: The president’s order will leave many children deportable and stateless.

It would rarely, if ever, be true that a U.S.-born child of illegal or nonpermanent resident aliens would be left stateless simply because he or she isn’t automatically granted U.S. citizenship. Virtually every nation (including the United States) recognizes some manner of citizenship “by blood,” under which a child is automatically eligible for citizenship when one or both parents are citizens, even if that child is born abroad.

Please follow the link above for further details. This battle will probably eventually make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It will be interesting to see how the Justices rule.

 

The Games Have Begun

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On Tuesday, Yahoo News posted an article about some of the lawsuits filed against President Trump’s executive orders. President Trump won the popular vote and the Electoral College, but that is not going to stop the deep state from trying to limit his power.

The article reports:

The lawsuits started to roll in on Monday within minutes of Trump being sworn into office for a second term. The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider.

Here are the Trump initiatives that have been targeted so far:

The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency came under swift legal attack shortly after Trump signed an executive order formally creating the group that aims to slash wasteful federal spending.

Advocacy organizations and public interest groups quickly filed a handful of lawsuits in the US District Court for the District of Columbia against DOGE.

Three of four lawsuits filed argue that DOGE violates the transparency requirements of the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act. DOGE, the lawsuits say, is not a federal department and should be considered a federal advisory committee subject to the FACA law.

…Another lawsuit, filed by several groups including the American Public Health Association and the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, contends that DOGE is a “shadow operation led by unelected billionaires who stand to reap huge financial rewards from this influence and access.”

…A fourth lawsuit, filed by the Center for Biological Diversity against the Office of Management and Budget, seeks to compel the government agency to hand over records related to DOGE under the Freedom of Information Act.

“These records are important for the public to understand the threats to numerous environmental protections embodied in rules and orders and how, when, and under what circumstances the new administration intends to act on these threats,” the lawsuit says.

Another major target of the lawsuit:

One of Trump’s executive orders targets the constitutional right to birthright citizenship. The order bars federal agencies from issuing documents recognizing the citizenship of babies born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally.

…The lawsuit says the order conflicts with the 14th Amendment’s provision that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

“This principle has enabled generations of children to pursue their dreams and build a stronger America,” the lawsuit says.

Please follow the link to the article for further details. The bottom line here is simple–the battle is not over–it has just begun.

Designed To Tug At Your Heart Strings

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Somehow most of the American media missed the fact that the young girl who approached the Pope about her fears that her parents would be deported was part of a staged event.

The U.K. Daily Mail posted the story yesterday. Follow the link to see all of the pictures.

The story relates:

Security had stopped Sophie before she could approach the pope on her first attempt during a parade at the Ellipse outside the White House.

On her carefully orchestrated attempt, her father lifted her over the barricade, and she was able to hand him the letter which included a touching drawing of Francis holding hands with children of differing ethnicity. Over the picture it read: ‘My friends and I love each other no matter our skin color.’

The schoolgirl said she already has a second letter which she plans to give to President Barack Obama someday.

In an interview with NBC before the trip, Sophie said she wanted Pope Francis to ask Obama about legalizing all immigrants in the United States. 

Gateway Pundit reported yesterday:

…Her father Raul Cruz , who like Sophie’s mother, came to the U.S. from Mexico’s southern state of Oaxaca about 10 years ago, said they were ‘so happy, so excited.’ Sophie and her sister were born in the United States and are therefore American citizens.

The Cruz family had traveled to see the Pope’s parade in Washington as part of a trip organized by Hermandad Mexicana Transnacional, based in Los Angeles, for six children and 19 adults, hoping to deliver their message on immigration.

I do feel sympathy for this family. However, their problem began with an illegal act–they came into America illegally and had children here. This is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue. The child was very sweet, but the moment was designed to manipulate the American public. I object.

One Side Of The Story

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The has been a lot of discussion among the political class lately about the concept of birthright citizenship. At the present time, the policy seems to be that any child born in America is an American citizen, regardless of the status of the child’s parents. There are valid arguments on both sides, but I would like to present the argument that says the child’s status depends on the status of the parents.

The quotes are from an article in the Conservative Review by Daniel Horowitz. Please follow the link to read the entire article.

The article points out what we would have to accept to say that any child born in America is automatically an American citizen:

Let’s put aside everything we believe as conservatives for a moment and take the activist ruling of Wong Kim Ark [169 U.S. 649 (1898)] as impregnable constitutional law.  As such, the 14th Amendment would compel Congress and the Executive agencies to grant citizenship to all children of legal immigrants.  Although we all agree as a matter of policy that it is a good idea to grant children born to legal permanent residents citizenship, by accepting the 1898 court decision as settled law, thereby enshrining birthright citizenship into our Constitution, we’d have to swallow the following ridiculous notions:

We’d be adopting one-directional stare decisis of an activist court that overturned two previous court decisions: the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases and Elk v. Wilkins (1884).  In those cases, the Supreme Court made it clear that the original intent of the 14th Amendment was primarily to grant equal rights to freed black slaves and that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” required that the petitioner for citizenship be “completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.”  These cases excluded children born to foreign diplomats and Native American Indians and were quite clear that the meaning of the 14th Amendment would not include all children of immigrants – most of whom would have been covered by less political jurisdiction than even those born on Indian reservations, which were partially under U.S. jurisdiction.

…Immigration transformation pursued outside of the democratic process is even worse than having courts decide societal issues, such as abortion and gay marriage, in what Justice Scalia calls “societal transformation without representation.”  The courts have now empowered themselves to unilaterally and immutably change civil society itself – without any recourse from those the Constitution vested with making such decisions.  How far we have deviated from the Founders’ vision that even so-called conservatives support the idea of changing the civil society without the consent of its citizens.

Indeed, the issue of birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants is not just a tangential topic within immigration.  It cuts to the very core of how illegal immigrants are able to coerce their will on the American citizenry and the broader issue of sovereignty.  This runs much deeper than the 14th Amendment.  The question for policy-makers has moved beyond whether we will survive as a nation as our Founder’s envisioned.  We have already deviated so far from that vision.  It’s a question of whether we are a nation at all.       

When told that we need automatic citizenship for all children born here regardless of the status of their parents, you might want to consider what the policy is in other countries. In most countries, enforcing the border is considered a natural thing to do. It is not a matter of debate. If an American went to Mexico illegally, he would be jailed or sent home–no other options. If we are to remain a nation, we have to begin to act like one. Acting like a nation includes taking responsibility for enforcing our borders and knowing who is in our country. We do need to change our immigration system to allow for legal immigration, but before we do that, we have to end illegal immigration.