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Birthright Citizenship

The Necessity Of Birthright Citizenship For Black People

The idea of citizenship has always been a thorny one for Black people. The original United States constitution allowed the enslaved to be counted for purposes of determining congressional representation, but only as three-fifths of a person. The struggles for liberation during enslavement reached their nadir in the 1857 Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sandford , in which not only were an enslaved man and his family wrongly deprived of their freedom, but Chief Justice Roger B. Taney infamously declared that not only were the Scotts not free, but that no Black person had any rights “which the white man was bound to respect.”

Seven Supreme Court Cases That Black Americans Should Track This Summer

From voting rights to health care to workplace equality, the U.S. Supreme Court will weigh in on a number of issues this summer that could have major implications for Black Americans. “In America, for Black people, we’ve had a long season where our rights were generally respected,” said Andrea Young, executive director of the ACLU, who has been closely following the Trump administration’s legal moves. “We have Black elected officials … Black leaders in corporate America, we have extreme poverty, but we also have thriving middle class communities. We have many areas where we have lots of highly educated black people. All of those things rest on a legal framework that allows those rights to be protected.”

Trump’s Blitz On Immigration Aimed To Overwhelm

Pandering to his nativist base, Donald Trump made the central pledge of his 2024 presidential campaign a threat to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” On January 20, 2025, he began to fulfill that promise. On Inauguration Day, repeating the words spoken by Chief Justice John Roberts, Trump swore to uphold the U.S. Constitution. Setting aside the issue of whether he purposely refrained from placing his hand on the Bible his wife was holding, the oath Trump swore triggered the “Take Care Clause” of the Constitution. Article II imposes on the president the duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

Trump Promises To End Birthright Citizenship And Shut Down The Border

During his first day in office on Jan. 20, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders on immigration that would make it harder for refugees, asylum seekers and others to try to enter the U.S. – and for some immigrants to stay in the country. On Monday night, Trump signed executive orders that included declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and pausing refugee admissions for at least four months. Migrants trying to enter the U.S. at the border also found that CBP One, an app they used to schedule asylum application appointments, was shut down.

ACLU Sues Trump Over Birthright Citizenship Executive Order

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with several other pro-immigrant groups, is suing the Trump administration after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to end the constitutionally recognized right of birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states in its first sentence 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. Yet on Monday, his first day back in the White House, Trump falsely asserted that he had the presidential right to unilaterally change the interpretation of the amendment.
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