But Trump insisted he and his lawyers have found some disturbing holes in the amendment, which unequivocally states that anyone born in the United States is in fact an American citizen.
The Fourteenth Amendment is a few paragraphs long, but I’ll just cut and paste Section One, the relevant section for this discussion. Actually, only the first sentence is relevant, so I will make that bold.
Amendment XIV
Section 1.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. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
You do not need a law degree to make sense of the first sentence. If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen of the United States. That’s what it says. It’s in English.
Now, this presents a problem for Trump and those who hate the idea of “anchor babies”, i.e., a pregnant Mexican woman takes a step across the U.S.-Mexico border into Texas, drops her baby out, and bam, that new baby is a U.S. citizen — and since it is heartless to separate the baby from the parents, they get to stay too.
Except that isn’t true. The baby is a citizen. The parents are not. They have to jump through legal hurdles which can take as much as 31 years. So the “anchor” isn’t really much of an anchor.
But even if the concern is about the child and not the parents, the argument of conservatives is this: we didn’t have the anchor baby issue back when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified (July 1868, three years after the end of the civil war). That clause was in there so that freed slaves would automatically become American citizens.
Yes, that may have been the overriding intent, but who is to say that was the only intent? After all, whoever wrote the Fourteenth Amendment could have just as easily written, “All those held in indentured servitude prior to this Amendment are now citizens of the United States”. But it wasn’t written that way. It was written for going forward.
Besides, how come that argument doesn’t work for the Second Amendment? Clearly, the founders who wrote the Second Amendment were only familiar with flintlocks, not AK-47s. Do conservatives really want to go down the “original intent” road?