Both at the ACLU of New Hampshire, Devon Chaffee is the executive director and SangYeob Kim is senior staff attorney. On Monday, Feb. 10, ACLU-NH challenged President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship in court in Concord.

Mere hours after taking the presidency on Jan. 20, President Trump issued an executive order that would strip certain babies born in the United States of their U.S. citizenship. That same night, just over an hour after the order was signed, we sued in federal court to protect what has served as a pillar of American democracy for well over a century. And today, we and our allies continue that fight at the federal courthouse in Concord.

Trump’s executive order stands in stark contradiction to core American values steeped in history going back to the very founding of our nation.

The principle of birthright citizenship, which affirms that every baby born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, is explicitly protected in the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And every attack on birthright citizenship, from the 19th century until now, has been grounded in racism, including attempts to disenfranchise freed enslaved people and their descendants.

In 1857, in one of the most shameful and racist judicial decisions in our history, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected this right in Dred Scott v. Sanford, denying citizenship to the descendants of enslaved people despite their birth in the U.S. This decision was controversial even at the time it was issued, and a decade later, in 1868 during the wake of the Civil War, Congress repudiated the Dred Scott ruling by ratifying the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Thirty years later in 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that children born in the United States to immigrant parents were entitled to U.S. citizenship.

And until now, for more than 125 years, birthright citizenship has remained an undisturbed constitutional bedrock.

Specifically, the 14th Amendment guarantees the citizenship of all children born in the U.S. regardless of race, color or ancestry, with the extremely narrow exception of children of foreign diplomats.

Article continues after...

Yesterday's Most Read Articles

Letter: End New Hampshire vehicle inspections

Man dies in mechanical accident with dump truck in Bow

Boys’ hockey: Concord takes championship in historic quadruple overtime victory over BG, 2-1

‘Voting our wallets’: Loudon residents vote overwhelmingly against $1.7M bond for new fire truck

CJ Girard: Passionate father, fierce firefighter, genuine friend

Inside EFAs: How New Hampshire’s school choice program ignited an internal feud within the state’s homeschooling community

Your Daily Puzzles

Cross|Word

Flipart

Typeshift

SpellTower

Really Bad Chess

Moreover, it 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.”

It means that every child born in the U.S. is born with the same rights as every other child, meaning no politician can ever decide who among those born in our country is worthy of citizenship without amending the Constitution.

The executive order, if enforced, would instead create a permanent, multigenerational subclass of people born in the U.S who are denied their full rights.

It would end birthright citizenship for children of immigrants who are “unauthorized,” here legally but on a temporary visa or otherwise not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. It would exclude the babies of noncitizens with various statuses, such as people on various work visas, student visa holders, people with some protected status like DACA and asylees.

And for those targeted by this order who are expecting a child, this is a very real, deep fear that will intrinsically change their lives.

Right after birth, certain babies would be considered undocumented, potentially-stateless noncitizens and could be denied basic health care and nutrition, putting the newborn at grave risk at such a vulnerable stage of life.

Additionally, as they grow up, these children would be unable to obtain required identification and eventually be denied the right to vote, serve on juries, hold certain jobs and otherwise be a full member of American society, even though they were born in the U.S. and have never lived anywhere else.

It is painful to imagine the exclusion, discrimination and demonization these children would feel.

The Dred Scott decision was one of the gravest errors in our country’s history, and this executive order seeks to repeat it by creating this permanent subclass of people who are born in the United States but who are denied full rights as Americans.

Denying citizenship to a class of people born in the U.S. because of their parents’ immigration status will lead to stigma, racial profiling and questioning of citizenship of all sorts of American families.

We cannot let cruel, racist, unconstitutional policies like this wreak havoc on our communities and deny basic rights to countless children.

The 14th Amendment makes clear that no politician can ever decide who among those born in our country is worthy of citizenship.