Monday was, as hard as this may be to remember, Martin Luther King Jr Day. An enormous number of schools all around the country were either closed or had assemblies where students heard about the life and accomplishments of the martyred civil rights crusader.
It was also the first day of Donald Trump’s second administration, and Trump signed an unprecedented number (twenty-six) of executive orders. Some were merely silly, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Others are vastly more ominous, like the order mandating far more aggressive use of the death penalty.
The worst of the lot attempts to deny citizenship to people born in the United States whose parents aren’t American citizens. While this isn’t a homogeneous group, a large majority is presumably composed of the children of people from Mexico and Central America, hence the long-standing hostility to “birthright” citizenship by immigration hawks who seek to reduce this population.
The legal ground on which Trump stands on this issue could hardly be any shakier. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution baldly states 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.” That seems fairly clear.
The White House is trying to find legal wiggle room within the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” but this makes no sense on its face (as well as contradicting more than a century of consistent legal precedents). It’s not as if either noncitizen immigrants or their American-born children have diplomatic immunity. A Mexican immigrant, with or without a green card, who’s accused of a…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
