On January 21, two federal lawsuits were filed to overturn President Donald’s Trump Executive Order on birthright citizenship. The leading such case is filed by 18 states in U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. It is titled State of New Jersey et al v Trump, 1:25cv-10139. Here is the Brief. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Leo T. Sorokin, an Obama appointee.
This blog post is election-related. Varying definitions of citizenship affect whether certain individuals can run for office in the United States.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/reservoir-built-save-pacific-palisades-110052616.html
la fires –
nooo reservoir — govt immune — aka worthless ???
insurance biz forced to insure a fire doom zone ???
also definition of elector-voter ??? signing ballot access and issue petitions – const amdts / laws / recalls
in all 50 states ???
https://electionlawblog.org/?p=148303
hasen – elb on b cases
What do you think subject to the jurisdiction thereof means?
Q, that is discussed at length in the brief. It’s an interesting read.
At what point does an invading army gain residence?
Tourists can be arrested, just like US citizens visiting whatever country they are visiting. That doesn’t make children born to tourists citizens of whatever country they are born in.
Prisoners of war can be taken during a military invasion, but a POW or enemy combatant soldier giving birth does not make her baby a citizen of the country she is invading or held prisoner in.
Logically, children of illegal invaders and trespassers aren’t more entitled to citizenship of the country where they are a fetus inside an illegal invader/trespasser. They are not like natural born citizens or legal immigrants. The distinction is fundamental to national sovereignty.
Supposing you own a home, you can rent it out or invite someone to stay there with you on a short term or long term basis. Supposing that someone is a woman who is pregnant or becomes pregnant, once her child is born, that child has the same conditional right to remain in your home as the mother. If you marry her or adopt the child, additional rights are conveyed until a divorce, separation or adulthood.
If you rent out a home as an airbnb a child who is born there doesn’t magically become a resident. If a pregnant woman breaks into your house and gives birth, the baby doesn’t have any more right to remain there than the trespassing mother. If you let a pregnant woman in during an emergency and she gives birth, that does not convey a responsibility to permanently shelter either one after the emergency.
If it was otherwise, you can’t really be said to own your home.
Likewise, a nation can not be said to be sovereign if illegal invaders and trespassers convey citizenship on children who are born there because their mothers are invading or trespassing or given temporary permission to be there.
More fundamental than what level of restrictions you want is *who gets to decide and how*. The home ownership analogy is not flawed, and the number of owners is not fundamental to it. Most homes are jointly owned (by married couples), but for this purpose we can suppose a larger number of owners – for example, a large publicly traded apartment complex rental agency.
The point is that ownership rights are fundamentally destroyed if any woman who has a child on that property gains joint ownership rights for her child simply by giving birth there (and according to most of those who advocate this, permanent residency for herself and her whole family too), even if she was on the property illegally when it happened or merely visiting.
Such a rule would be illogical and counterproductive. It would incentivize the homeless and jobless to have lots of unprotected sex and break into homes and apartments, squat, give birth there, and become unevictable. It would encourage other people to quit their jobs or cut back their work hours, concentrate on conceiving children, and stop paying their rent or mortgage since having a child would make them de facto owners.
This would be even more true if it additionally qualified them for a wide range of benefits – educational, medical, food aid, protection/security, etc.
No sane society would have such home ownership rules, and no sane country would have such citizenship rules, for exactly those same reasons.
If subject to the jurisdiction thereof was equivalent to “potentially subject to being arrested”, the phrase would be superfluous. Anyone who is physically in the United States is potentially subject to being arrested. Tourists can be arrested. Enemy combatants can be taken as prisoners of war. Diplomats can only be expelled, but even they can be detained for questioning and confined to their embassy, residence or temporary residence such as hotel room until expelled.
The fact that American Indians were not originally considered subject to the jurisdiction illustrates that those words have a meaning other than “potentially subject to arrest.” That meaning was more like “owing allegiance to,” which citizens of other countries (including, at that time, of American Indian tribes) who are in the US temporarily or illegally do not.
In the analogy, the equivalent would be an illogical misinterpretation of the joint ownership deed by a rogue court to create absurd and unintended incentives for trespassers that would dilute and devalue the ownership stakes, all because of an interpretation which was never intended by those who wrote the deed.
The fact that a majority of the owners don’t approve of this interpretation isn’t even the point here.
You can be very nonrestrictionist in your preferences – say, a home for unwed mothers with plenty of space and a very large endowment grant. But even in that case, space is still not unlimited, the endowment grant runs into limits at some hypothetical point, and the mothers and children have to leave at some point – they don’t get to stay for the rest of their lives at the owners expense and become owners themselves, with the right extended to all descendents in perpetuity.
If that were the case, the owners are not owners, and if the joint ownership is in the form of a sovereign nation, they thus cease to be a sovereign nation – even if the process takes a number of decades to play out to its inevitable conclusion.
The prequel to 14th amendment citizenship was the civil rights act of 1866 which includes the language “…all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”
Illegal aliens are subjects of foreign powers, unlike either natural born citizens or legal immigrants. Foreign tourists, temporary residents, diplomats, invading enemy combatants, and (until subsequently changed) members of American Indian nations are all subjects of foreign powers, so their children born in the US are not within the original intent of birthright citizenship.
Natural born citizens, naturalized citizens, and legal permanent residents are not subjects of foreign powers, so their children have birthright citizenship. They remain US subjects even when outside of the US, not foreign subjects, so their children have US birthright citizenship even if born outside the US.
If, however, subjects of the US or subjects of foreign powers were distinguished by physical location at any given moment, even the children of natural born US citizens wouldn’t have birthright citizenship if born abroad – after all, their parents can be arrested by the government of whatever country they’re in, and can’t be arrested by the US government unless and until they return to the US.
Hopefully Trump order will be upheld and the frivolous lawsuits against it rejected.
Which commenters above have read the brief?
When the other side files its brief, BAN will link to it. This case will move fast.
Can you speak for yourself or at least quote what you think are the most relevant portions for those who aren’t going to read 30 pages of legalese, don’t give pdf permission to access their phones, etc?
The analogy to property ownership is not even discussed in the plaintiffs’ brief. Maybe it will be in the federal government’s brief, but I doubt it. To me it is not persuasive. Citizenship doesn’t give anyone the right to any particular piece of property. Whether one is a citizen or not has nothing to do with being homeless. If a city in the U.S. doesn’t permit anyone to sleep in a city park, it makes no difference whether the sleeper is a citizen or not. Citizenship relates to voting and passport rights.
MAJOR PROBLEM –
NATION-STATE [ALLEGIANCE] STATUS OF ALLEGED FATHERS ARE N-O-T SHOWN ON BIRTH CERTIFICATES—
IE CHAIN OF ALLEGIANCE—– FATHERS/KIDS
—
OTHER –
NOOO SUCH THING AS *DUAL CITIZENSHIP*. —- ALLEGIANCE TO 2 [ OR MORE ] NATION-STATE REGIMES
Nobody said the analogy to property ownership was in the brief. What does that have to do with whether it’s persuasive?
The entire country is the property in question. Birthright citizenship by illegal aliens is no more logical as to a country than birthright property coownership by trespassers would be. The reasons are exactly the same.
Voting is how ownership is exercised within a joint ownership, and is diluted by birthright ownership shares for trespassers.
If stock in a corporation were to be diluted like that, it would become rather worthless.
DEPORT THEM ALL INCLUDING ANCHOR BABIES! NO CITIZENSHIP FOR ILLEGALS!
Well said. I’m looking forward to many millions of illegals and anchors being deported and all of the horrible consequences of the awful 1965 immigration law being undone, including getting rid of every one who is here as a result regardless of where they were born.
We must undo the terrible cultural and political changes that the Marxist – cultural Marxist culture warfare cabal wrecked this country with in the mid 1960s.