MORE FALSEHOODS FROM OUR “LIAR-IN-CHIEF”

…Our Liar-In-Chief also has a very big mouth

“You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order,” per House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) 

Trump: “It was always told to me that you needed a Constitutional amendment to change citizenship rules. Guess what? You don’t. . . . You can definitely do it with an act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order. Now, how ridiculous — we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, has a baby and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits.”

Fact: As for the president’s claim that only the United States offers birthright citizenship. Thirty-three countries have similar laws, including Canada and Mexico.  Trump’s promised executive order would be challenged in the courts and likely enjoined until the case was resolved.

The president claims he can end birthright citizenship in the United States simply by signing an executive order. That’s an extraordinary claim.  It was never tested in the courts and is contradicted by the Justice Department.  “You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) said hours after Trump’s announcement

The first sentence of the 14^th amendment seems pretty clear, but there are quibbles about its meaning because someone stuck a vague clause in the middle.

“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,” the amendment says.

The Supreme Court ruled in 1898 that this right to citizenship covered Wong Kim Ark who was born in San Francisco to Chinese nationals legally residing in the United States.

“The Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country,” Justice Horace Gray wrote for the court.

“The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.”

In the 1982 case Plyer v. Doe, the court said Texas could not exclude the children of undocumented immigrants from public schools. The Supreme Court added that “no plausible distinction with respect to 14th Amendment ‘jurisdiction’ can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful.”

In 1995, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel rejected the idea that Congress could restrict birthright citizenship through legislation (never mind an executive order).

Birthright citizenship is in the Constitution, so the only way to change it is by constitutional amendment, then-Assistant Attorney General Walter Dellinger wrote and testified to Congress:

“The phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ was meant to reflect the existing common law exception for discrete sets of persons who were deemed subject to a foreign sovereign and immune from U.S. laws, principally children born in the United States of foreign diplomats, with the single additional exception of children of members of Indian tribes. Apart from these extremely limited exceptions, there can be no question that children born in the United States of aliens are subject to the full jurisdiction of the United States. And, as consistently recognized by courts and Attorneys General for over a century, most notably by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, there is no question that they possess constitutional citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

AG Dellinger is not alone. “Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment,” James C. Ho, whom Trump later appointed to the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, wrote in a 2006 law review article.

“That birthright is protected no less for children of undocumented persons than for descendants of Mayflower passengers.”

“Opponents of illegal immigration cannot claim to champion the rule of law and then, in the same breath, propose policies that violate our Constitution,” Ho wrote in a 2011 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

However, the Supreme Court could “revisit its own precedent in Wong Kim Ark and rule that children of noncitizens are not birthright citizens,” Martha S.Jones, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of “Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in ANtebellum America,” wrote on Twitter.

“It would be a departure from precedent, but it is possible,” she said. Alternatively, the court could draw a distinction between the children of legal residents and those of undocumented immigrants to resolve the case in Trump’s favor.

“My view is that this sort of wholesale or categorical exclusion is contrary to the spirit of the 14th Amendment, which aimed to expand and open a way for citizenship, especially for those who might otherwise be denied because of racism,” Jones added. “The case being former slaves.”

Mark Kirkorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tighter immigration policies, said he suspected the Supreme Court would overturn Trump’s executive order. Even that would be a good result, since it would settle the debate once and for all, he said.

“I’m just saying that this is ambiguous. It’s not obvious,” Krikorian said. “These issues literally did not exist when this amendment was drafted and approved. The question is what does the exception mean?”

Krikorian said one of his foremost concerns was “birth tourism,” or the practice of some parents of traveling to the United States to give birth, secure U.S. citizenship for their children and then raise those children in their home countries.

“Those kids do not grow up as Americans,” he said. “There’s nobody who’s for that. Whereas the kid of an illegal alien, who goes to school every day, says the Pledge of Allegiance, that kid is an American.

That’s a pretty sympathetic situation.”

(There’s no official estimate for birth-tourism cases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 2012 estimated that about 8,000 women, accounting for less than 1 percent of annual U.S. births, gave a foreign address when filling out birth certificate paperwork; CIS in 2015 produced a rough estimate of 36,000 babies born to foreign nationals per year.)

The Migration Policy Institute says that “birthright citizenship is not what drives illegal immigration” and that “most legal experts are clear that repeal would require a constitutional amendment."

Working with researchers at Pennsylvania State University, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) has found that ending birthright citizenship for U.S. babies with two unauthorized immigrant parents would increase the existing unauthorized population by 4.7 million people by 2050,” Michael Fix, a fellow and former president of the institute, wrote in 2015.

“The 14th Amendment provides for birthright citizenship,” Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said in a 2011 interview when he first ran for Senate. “I’ve looked at the legal arguments against it, and I will tell you, as a Supreme Court litigator, those arguments are not very good. As much as someone may dislike the policy of birthright citizenship, it’s in the U.S. Constitution. And I don’t like it when federal judges set aside the Constitution because their policy preferences are different. And so, my view: I think it’s a mistake for conservatives to be focusing on trying to fight what the Constitution says on birthright citizenship. I think we are far better off focusing on securing the border.”

As expected, Cruz flip-flopped by 2015, and Trump took credit for it on Twitter.

Trump Tweet: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you

Fact: The president’s authority to send troops to the border is not in question, although he’s wrong to imply that active-duty military forces would be detaining or capturing people attempting to cross into the United States.  The US military is not trained to do border patrol work and when sent, there will probably be some problems with those that are trained for war versus only maintaining civilian order.

Laura Ingraham, Fox News: “What’s the military going to be able to do? Obama and Bush both sent the National Guard. It’s had no effect.”

Trump: “But they’re not me. This is the — I’m sending up the military. This is the military. And they’re standing there and one thing that we’ll have. . . . When they are captured, we don’t let them out.”

Trump talks a big game on immigration, but there’s less here than meets the eye.

Trump also says active-duty military troops will be “waiting” at the border for the migrant caravan from Central America in case anyone attempts to cross into the United States; he implied on Fox News that these migrants could be “captured” by the military.

Fact:  The Trump administration is in fact deploying 5,200 active-duty troops to the southern border by the end of the week, because a caravan of nearly 3,500 Central American migrants slowly working its way through Mexico poses a threat.  But this threat only according to Trump and other administration officials. Most of the people in this caravan are women and children escaping with their lives.

The 5,200 troops deploying to the border will not be apprehending migrants. The Defense Department says these troops will be operating under legal restraints and providing a range of support services to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency that patrols the Rio Grande and carries out border apprehensions.

That’s in addition to the 2,000 National Guardsmen already at the border. (And there’s another caravan of 3,000 migrants trailing the first caravan.)

For perspective, the 7,200 troops deployed to the border are about equal to the US military presence in Iraq (5,200 troops) and Syria (2,000 troops) as of August.

Copyright G.Ater  2018