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President Donald Trump wants to change the 14th amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil.
UNITED STATES TODAY & # 39; HUI

Brett Kavanaugh flipped through a well-worn, pocket-sized copy of the Constitution at the Supreme Court confirmation hearing last month. President Trump attacks the Constitution and federal law with the goal of ending citizenship.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images)

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump may have met his match on Tuesday. 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to their jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and the state in which they reside," begins the 1868 amendment.

"It's ridiculous," said Trump 150 years later, on the eve of mid-term elections that could erode his power, perhaps for the rest of his presidency. "And that must end."

This is how it started the last legal, political and political battle of the 45th president, clearly contained in a history lesson dating from the reconstruction.

While the administration has been committed to blocking a caravan of migrants heading to the southern border and postponing a trial of its 2020 citizenship application draft the next week's census, Trump will say that the government will not be able to do so. is focused on generations of American citizens.

In doing so, it adopted both the Constitution and the federal law. Title 8, Section 1401 of the American Code lists persons considered as citizens of the United States, beginning with "a person born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction of the United States".

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The Supreme Court ruled in the case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in a 1898 affair, that a man born on American soil to parents of Chinese nationals was a citizen. In a 1982 decision in Plyler v. Doe, the High Court stated that even if a person entered the country illegally, it was within the jurisdiction of the United States and that their children born in the United States were entitled to the protection of the 14th Amendment.

Trump said that he had been informed that he could cancel both the Constitution and the law and terminate citizenship under a legitimate right. He has support.

Michael Anton, a former spokesman for the National Security Council, recently wrote in the Washington Post that the 14th amendment had been drafted so as not to apply to undocumented immigrants.

Michael Anton, National Security Advisor, is waiting in the East Room of the White House in Washington for the start of President Donald Trump's press conference on February 16, 2017. (Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

To the extent that the amendment applies to people under US jurisdiction, he said, he makes a distinction between those to whom the United States owes citizenship and those to whom it is not.

"The freed slaves are definitely qualified," Anton said. "The children of immigrants who came here illegally clearly do not do it."

Other conservatives claim that at least Congress, if it's not the president, can end citizenship by law. John Eastman, director of the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence at the Claremont Institute, wrote that the 1898 decision only applied to legal immigrant children.

"It is time to clarify that the 14th Amendment does not grant US citizenship to anyone's children simply because they can successfully deliver on American soil," Eastman writes in the New York Times. .

Most jurists disagree. In his congressional testimony in 1995, Deputy Attorney General Walter Dellinger said that even congressional efforts to deny citizenship to some US-born children were not a solution.

"Public officials should not exercise any discretion on this issue.There should be no investigation into whether any of them came from caste, race, of the lineage or lineage appropriate for establishing US citizenship, "said Mr. Dellinger. "In America, a country that has rejected the monarchy, every person is born equal, without a curse of infirmity and without high status, arising from the situation of his parentage."

On Tuesday, Dellinger noted that Trump's proposal would question even the citizenship of those whose parents or grandparents had citizenship of the right of birth.

Dellinger is a Liberal, but many Conservatives agree with his assessment. James Ho, appointed by Trump to the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit last year, wrote in 2011 that states' efforts to rewrite the US citizenship law were unconstitutional.

"Opponents of illegal immigration can not claim to defend the rule of law and then, in the same breath, propose policies contrary to our Constitution," wrote Ho. "Citizenship is a constitutional right, no less for the children of undocumented people than for the descendants of the Mayflower passengers. "

Dred Scott filed the first lawsuit in which the Supreme Court denied citizenship to blacks. Scott sued for his freedom when he was enslaved after living free in Missouri. His owners eventually released him. (Photo: Library of Congress / USA TODAY & # 39; HUI)

Prior to the civil war, the Constitution did not explicitly define what made someone a US citizen, leading to decades of disputes, according to lawyers Akhil Reed Amar and John C. Harrison. In the judgment Dred Scott v. Sandford of 1857, the Supreme Court had ruled that people of African descent, whether they were slaves or free, were not entitled to full citizenship.

"At the simplest level, the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was supposed to repudiate Dred Scott," Amar wrote. "However, it was also intended to root America's post-civil war – the second foundation of America – in an inspiring, Lincoln-inspired reinterpretation of one of the truths founders of our nation, that we are all created / born free and equal. "

Amar, a law professor at Yale University, said the citizenship clause of the amendment "marked a significant shift in US identity" and "established a simple national rule of citizenship If you were born in the United States under our flag, you are an American citizen. "

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