Legal group American First Legal is leading an effort to end birthright citizenship by returning to the “original meaning” of the Fourteenth Amendment.
AFL filed a brief with the Supreme Court on behalf of members of the House Judiciary Committee, urging the court to “defend the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment,” a press release explains.
The brief argues that allegiance is a “reciprocal relationship.” According to the filing, “The person must be present with the consent of the sovereign,” although illegal immigrants and their children are “present in the United States without consent.”
Similarly, children born in the United States to “ambassadors or invading soldiers would not receive citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. The best reason is because they do not owe total allegiance to the United States, rather than (as Plaintiffs contend) because those groups allegedly have immunity from federal law.”
“Because the Fourteenth Amendment does not confer citizenship on the children of illegally present aliens, and because Congress has not done so by statute, the other branches cannot confer such citizenship on their own,” the brief adds. “The Executive Order at issue here properly ensures that rule is followed within the executive branch, but the lower courts nonetheless enjoined the Executive Order.”
President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship has been battled in courts for months. In July, The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the order. A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the “district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree.” They added, “We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the States complete relief.”
