SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
executive order
We Will All Be Casualties in Trump’s War on Birthright Citizenship
What Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us.
Dec 20, 2024
On December 8, President-elect Donald Trump sat down for an interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. The interview covered a wide range of topics, but one that drew a lot of attention was his response to a question (more of a statement) that Welker posed. She reminded him, “You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one,” to which he responded, “Correct.”
When Welker asked him about how he would “get around the 14th amendment,” Trump gave a rambling, incoherent answer about using an executive order, mixed with an easily disprovable lie that the U.S. is the only country to offer birthright citizenship, when in fact many countries do. It is important to emphasize that all U.S. presidents take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and when Trump says he will issue an executive order abrogating the 14th amendment, this is a clear violation of his oath and an impeachable offense.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America.
I previously wrote about why we need to defend birthright citizenship against right-wing attacks. That article goes into depth about the 14th amendment, the fringe and absurd conservative theory saying it doesn’t apply to children of undocumented parents, the horrible dystopia that would be created by a Trump administration that attempted to deny citizenship to people, and the positive benefits of birthright citizenship.
Here, I am going to attempt to flesh out what Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us. It is important to remember that Trump rarely speaks in terms of policy specifics. Instead, he carelessly tosses out grandiose, vague ideas and leaves it up to his underlings like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to make actual policy out of them. Although Trump bluffs and lies frequently, he was very active on immigration in his last term, and there is no reason to think this second term will be any different.
Denial of U.S. Passports and Immigrant Petitions to Draw a Legal Challenge
I believe the most likely way that President-elect Trump would start his war on the 14th amendment would be to direct the U.S. Department of State to require that anyone applying for a U.S. passport provide proof that their parents had legal status when they were born. Inevitably, some people will not be able to meet this requirement, and their passport applications will be denied. This will draw legal challenges that will eventually make their way to the Supreme Court.
Another potential attack that Trump could make would be to direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to demand proof of parental status for any U.S. citizen who tries to petition for permanent resident status for their relative. If you are a U.S. citizen, you can petition for your spouse, child, or parent to obtain permanent resident status (a green card) by filing form I-130 with USCIS. Currently, the citizen petitioner only needs to show they were born in the U.S. to prove citizenship. Trump could add a requirement that they prove their parents were in lawful status when they were born. If they are unable to, then they will not be able to petition for their relatives to stay with them in the U.S.
The Supreme Court is stacked with right-wing, activist justices who have shown time and time again that they are perfectly willing to ignore the plain text of the law (in this case, the 14th amendment) if it suits their policy goals. There is a non-insignificant chance that they will ignore the text of the 14th amendment and upend over 100 years of settled law to rule by fiat that children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents are not granted citizenship at birth.
Of course, this is the goal of Miller, Homan, and the other anti-immigrant MAGA acolytes. They know that they are never going to get enough popular support for a constitutional amendment that would strip citizenship from children of undocumented parents. Their best hope is to draw a legal challenge and take their case to a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court in the hope that they will invalidate birthright citizenship through a court decision.
The Nightmare Scenario: Weaponizing ICE to Detain U.S. Citizens
The nightmare, dystopian scenario, which I touched on in my previous piece, would be for Donald Trump to direct U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to begin detaining people who were born in the U.S., but who cannot prove that their parents had lawful status when they were born. Think about how onerous of a requirement it would be to have to prove that your parents had lawful status when you were born. Most people from previous generations didn’t have any affirmative proof of citizenship, unless they naturalized. If your parents were born in the U.S., how can they prove their parents were in lawful status? What about their parents? Would you have to prove a chain of unbroken status dating back to the inception of the 14th amendment? It creates a potentially impossible standard in order to prove U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the U.S., let alone children with undocumented parents.
Let’s imagine the implications of a bad-faith Republican President like Trump aggressively challenging the citizenship of people born in the U.S. If someone is retroactively deemed to be a noncitizen, then they have likely been unlawfully present in the U.S. their entire life. Whenever they worked or voted in any U.S. election, they were doing so unlawfully. This would give ICE a way to detain virtually anyone that Donald Trump wanted to go after. Since this would apply to so many people, it could easily be used selectively against Trump’s enemies. It is worth highlighting that people in immigration detention suffer horrible conditions. People in immigration proceedings have no right to an attorney, and the government has substantial power to hold people in immigration detention without bond.
It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America. Any citizen who commits any kind of minor crime, or even requests a government benefit like food stamps, could suddenly face deportation if they can’t prove their parents had lawful status when they were born. There really is no bottom to how awful things could be if we lose the protection of birthright citizenship.
Although we cannot predict exactly how the new administration will go after the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, it is important that we stand against it at every turn, because if we lose birthright citizenship, the country we are left with won’t be one that we recognize.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Critics Warn RNC 'Bloodbath' a Preview of What Project 2025 Would Do If Trump Reelected
"There's already a recruitment and training program for MAGA militants underway," said one journalist focused on the issue.
Mar 12, 2024
Over 60 staffers at the Republican National Committee have reportedly been let go following the change in leadership instigated by presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, and critics warn this could be a preview of what Trump would do to the federal government should he win reelection in November.
"In a letter to some political and data staff, Sean Cairncross, the RNC's new chief operating officer, said that the new committee leadership was 'in the process of evaluating the organization and staff to ensure the building is aligned' with its vision. 'During this process, certain staff are being asked to resign and reapply for a position on the team,'" Politico reports.
2025 Project: First they came for the RNC... https://t.co/7FHBGA3Va4
— Andrea Chalupa (@AndreaChalupa) March 12, 2024
For some political observers, the purge at the RNC should serve as a preview of Project 2025, an initiative led by The Heritage Foundation and Trump allies, that would, in part, replace over 50,000 civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists. This would be accomplished through an executive order referred to as Schedule F that would allow Trump, if back in the White House, to fire large numbers of career government workers who currently have protected status.
Trump issued this executive order at the end of his first term, but he was not able to implement the plan before President Joe Biden took office and rescinded the order.
Trump fired 60 RNC staffers? There’s already a recruitment + training program for MAGA militants underway. See my upcoming report on the undersides of Project 2025.
— Anne Nelson (@anelsona) March 12, 2024
The idea behind Project 2025 is that Trump would be able to wield more power and face fewer obstacles to accomplishing his goals if he had a federal government stocked with loyalists.
Trump has made it clear he wants the RNC to be loyal and ideologically aligned with his agenda. Meanwhile, the right-wing effort to push forward Project 2025 as a blueprint for Trump's second term has his political opponents on high alert about a similar kind of purge—but one with much more dire consequences for the nation than a reshuffling of RNC leadership.
Having dozens of people fired after he's installed a new leader there could reflect the kind of thing he plans to do if he gets to implement Project 2025. As Axios reported last week, the Biden campaign plans intends to outline the dangers of this plan consistently throughout the general election.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden Applauded for Executive Order Targeting 'Insidious' Anti-Worker Practices
The president's new order takes aim at a "growing trend of employers requiring workers to sign away their rights."
Jul 09, 2021
Among the 72 initiatives packed into the far-reaching executive order President Joe Biden signed Friday are steps that labor advocates welcomed as important victories for U.S. workers, including a provision calling for the limitation of noncompete clauses that drive down wages by preventing employees from quitting for better-paying jobs.
"The measures encouraged by this EO represent a wish list progressives and other pro-competition advocates have been promoting for years, and in some cases decades."
--David Segal, Demand Progress Education Fund
Presented as an effort to promote competition in an economy increasingly dominated by a handful of massive corporations, Biden's sweeping order calls on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)--now headed by antitrust law expert Lina Khan--to "ban or limit non-compete agreements," which the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen described as "insidious" ploys to restrict worker mobility and suppress wages.
Biden echoed that message in a speech on Friday, declaring that corporations use noncompete clauses "for one reason: to keep wages low."
Analysts estimate that tens of millions of private-sector workers are currently under some form of noncompete clause preventing them from leaving their jobs to work for--or start--a competing business within a certain period of time.
HuffPost labor reporter Dave Jamieson noted that while noncompete clauses have "traditionally been used to protect closely guarded business secrets in high-income fields... they have proliferated so much in recent years that they touch all income levels, even low-wage service work."
"In many cases, noncompete clauses are only 'agreements' in theory, since not signing one means not getting the job," Jamieson observed.
Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), said Thursday that "noncompetes are ubiquitous, harmful to wages and to competition, and part of a growing trend of employers requiring workers to sign away their rights."
Biden's decision to take aim at noncompete clauses as part of a broader effort to tackle corporate concentration won applause from unions and progressives advocacy groups, who said the president's order is an important step toward reversing the decades-long trend of stagnant wages and declining worker power.
"We support President Biden's focus on workers and consumers as we seek a more competitive economy," Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, said in a statement. "A successful economy must serve the people who produce the goods and services that improve our lives."
Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, said he is "especially pleased to see the administration move to protect America's most powerless workers and farmers."
"We hope the Biden administration stays on this path and truly stands with the people against those who seek to monopolize all opportunity, wealth, and power for themselves alone," Lynn added.
Other elements of Biden's executive order that seek to empower workers include a provision encouraging the FTC and Justice Department to "strengthen antitrust guidance to prevent employers from collaborating to suppress wages or reduce benefits by sharing wage and benefit information with one another."
"This EO sends a clear and unambiguous message that corporate concentration throughout our economy is a crisis-level problem."
--Alex Harman, Public Citizen
In recent years, major corporations--from Google and Apple to McDonald's and Burger King--have entered so-called "no poaching" pacts agreeing not to hire each other's workers, deals that critics say serve to drive down wages and benefits.
The president's order also urges the FTC to prohibit "unnecessary" occupational licensing restrictions, which can hinder workers from moving across state lines to find better-paying jobs in their field.
"The measures encouraged by this EO represent a wish list progressives and other pro-competition advocates have been promoting for years, and in some cases decades," David Segal, director of the Demand Progress Education Fund, said in a statement.
"From a ban on non-compete agreements that suppress wages and keep employees tied to jobs they would rather leave, to pushing for importation of cheaper prescription drugs from Canada--and from helping people switch between banks to addressing anti-competitive behavior in online marketplaces, these initiatives would improve the wellbeing of workers, small and mid-sized businesses, and consumers across essentially all major sectors of the American economy," Segal added.
Alex Harman, the competition policy advocate for Public Citizen, hailed Biden's order as "the most significant executive action against corporate monopolies in generations."
"This EO sends a clear and unambiguous message that corporate concentration throughout our economy is a crisis-level problem," said Harman. "That clarion call has been absent for decades, as administrations of both parties have let antitrust and antimonopoly enforcement fall into disrepair and decay."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular