Trump’s 14th Amendment nullification plan
By 
It’s very, very, very, very bad:
For months, federal courts blocked the Trump administration from developing any such plans, finding the executive order unconstitutional from top to bottom. In June, however, the Supreme Court expressly permitted the government to begin “developing and issuing public guidance about the executive’s plans to implement” Trump’s order. Acting on that decision, an immigration agency released the first stage of its “implementation plan” last Friday. It shocks the conscience. In dry bureaucratic language, the memo outlines a plan to revoke citizenship from the children of both immigrants who lack permanent legal status and many lawful residents, including visa holders, Dreamers, and asylum-seekers. It envisions intrusive federal review of parents’ papers—quite possibly in the hospital, before or shortly after birth—to gauge the newborn’s legal status. And it paves the way for people who spend their entire lives in the United States to be deported to countries in which they’ve never stepped foot, or to be condemned to the limbo of statelessness. To this administration, inflicting these unconstitutional harms isn’t a mere byproduct of the plan. It’s the whole point.
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The next section of the memo explains how the administration plans to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who have “lawful but temporary” presence here. Trump’s order itself clarifies that kids whose parents have “a student, work, or tourist visa” would no longer be eligible for citizenship. But USCIS went much further, laying out a dozen other categories of immigrants whose offspring would be ensnared by the policy—even though their parents reside in the country legally. Its list includes immigrants who have received “withholding of removal” under the Convention Against Torture, immigrants granted Temporary Protected Status, and Dreamers protected by DACA. The agency left no stone unturned: It even declared that children of Micronesian parents fall under the order, even though Micronesians have every right to live and work in the U.S. under a 1986 treaty. (That treaty constituted a small reparation after the U.S. tested atomic weapons on Micronesia for more than a decade.)
How will the federal government know whether a baby’s parents have “lawful but temporary” status, rendering the child ineligible for citizenship? USCIS does not say, but there is only one possibility: The government will begin to demand to see every parent’s legal status before acknowledging their child as a U.S. citizen. Only babies with at least one parent who is a citizen or green-card holder will be recognized as American. All others will be excluded at birth.
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The regime outlined in Friday’s memo is not just legally and morally abhorrent—it is a logistical nightmare that would, in practice, require grotesque federal intrusion into the privacy of birth. One benefit of birthright citizenship is its egalitarian simplicity: The only thing most people need to prove that they’re American is a birth certificate. Those lucky enough to be born here receive equality under the law from their very first breath. Trump seeks to replace that system with a caste-based vision of national identity in which every parent must provide documentation to secure their children’s fundamental rights. This system would put ICE agents in maternity wards and babies on deportation flights. It would also trip up millions of American citizens who lack the papers to prove that they belong here. Try as it might, the government cannot cover up these horrors with bureaucratic legalese.
Congratulations again to Amy Taney Barrett and the rest of the Supreme Court’s Republicans who directly facilitated this!