It is a big mistake to think that the idea of mass deportations arrived only with Trump. The 14th Amendment and naturalized citizens have long been a target of USA’s movement conservatives.
In The Hill, Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law professor Steven Lubet writes that the incoming Trump regime is planning not only to deport illegal aliens, but also naturalized citizens.
It appears that President-elect Donald Trump intends to keep his campaign promise to begin deporting at least 15 million people who, he claims, have been “poisoning the blood” of our country…. One initiative, smaller in scale but potentially devastating in its impact, will be aimed at immigrants who have become naturalized U.S. citizens.
Lubet writes that incoming deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller
… is likely to be especially influential and especially brutal.
“America is for Americans only,” he shouted at Trump’s Madison Square Garden campaign rally….
But even “documented” immigrants will not be safe, because Miller has declared that he will pursue the seldom-used process of “denaturalization” to go after people who have been citizens for years or decades, based on suspicions about purported fraud on their naturalization applications. Individuals stripped of citizenship will then be subject to deportation along with Miller’s other targets.
These bad ideas were percolating among USA conservatives long before Trump came on the scene. Garrett Epps wrote in Washington Monthly today (November 19, 2024) that in 2004,
… Reagan former Attorney General Edwin Meese and “coup memo” lawyer John C. Eastman, have claimed that the children of the undocumented are not citizens. After Kamala Harris (born in Oakland to legal immigrant parents) was nominated for Vice President, Eastman even wrote that she was not a “natural born citizen” and thus could not be vice president, objections he never raised about Canadian-born Ted Cruz. Even before he took office in 2017, Trump repeatedly attacked birthright citizenship., and he repeated his opposition during the 2024 campaign. In 2018, Michael Anton, a former Trump White House, proposed the idea that the president could set just set the clause aside by executive order, stripping American-born children of their citizenship if their parents were not in legal status when they were born.
In January 2011, former Bush Jr. DOJ official Hans A. von Spakovsky, posted an “opinion” on Fox News, entitled “Birthright Citizenship -- A Fundamental Misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment,” arguing against the idea
that anyone born in the United States is automatically a U.S. citizen, even if their parents are here illegally. But that ignores the text and legislative history of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children.
The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of “birthright” citizenship.
It’s instructive to read the Wikipedia biography of von Spakovsky:
He is the manager of The Heritage Foundation's Election Law Reform Initiative and a senior legal fellow in The Heritage Foundation's Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.[1] He is an advocate for stricter voting laws.[2][3] He has been described as playing an influential role in making concern about voter fraud mainstream in the Republican Party… [he] served as Republican Party chairman in Fulton County, Georgia, and as a Republican appointee to the Fulton County Registration and Election Board, where he championed strict voter-identification laws.
Von Spakovsky became a member of Voting Integrity Project, which investigated alleged voter fraud across the United States,[15] as well as a member of the politically conservative Federalist Society. He worked as a lawyer for George W. Bush's team during the 2000 Florida Presidential election recount.[13] After Bush's election victory, von Spakovsky was appointed to the Civil Rights division of the U.S. Department of Justice.[15]
In 2023, von Spakovsky authored the chapter on the Federal Election Commission for the ninth edition of the Heritage Foundation's book Mandate for Leadership, which provides the policy agenda for Project 2025.
It is noteworthy that von Spakovsky retains the oligarchic honorific of “von” in his name, a social relic of the defunct monarchies of central and eastern Europe. It indicates a lack of appreciation for the historical fight between the USA as a constitutional republic on one hand, and the oligarchies of the old world. This indifference to the issue of oligarchy versus republic, is one reason why I think it is now far more accurate to use the phrase “(anti)Republican Party,” than the misleading “Republican Party.”
You see this over and over again: the ideology of movement conservatism and libertarianism leads to policies and actions upset political norms, often in opposition to the Constitution. “Ye shall know them by their fruit.”
Von Spakovsky’s “opinion” includes a supporting quote from John Eastman, former dean at revanchist Chapman University School of Law, who has been criminally indicted for his role in obstructing the certification of the 2020 presidential election.
The promotion of this attack on 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship is the latest example of how movement conservatism moves the Overton window to make it possible to inject extremist (anti)Republican ideas and policies into the bloodstream of the body politic:
Von Spakovsky’s “opinion” of January 2011 was reposted on the Heritage Foundation website in October 2018,
In February 2019, von Spakovsky posted another “opinion” on Fox News, entitled “Birthright citizenship should end – it’s a magnet for immigration fraud and could threaten national security.”
Heritage Foundation posted another Von Spakovsky piece, “9 Things to Know About Birthright Citizenship,” on October 31, 2018,
“The Bane of Birthright Citizenship,” November 7, 2018, Heritage Foundation. This was written by Edwin J. Feulner, co-founder and first president of the Heritage Foundation. Fuelner has been one of the most important figures in the rise of USA movement conservatism. He began in politics as long-serving executive assistant to congressman Phil Crane, an (anti)Republican from the northwest suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. Crane was director of research for the 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and was considered the most conservative member of Congress during the time he served (November 1969 to January 2005). In his attack on the 14th Amendment, Fuelner wrote:
...Haven’t we all been told for years that if you’re born here, you’re automatically a U.S. citizen? It’s all right there in the 14th Amendment. No matter who your parents are or what their status is, you’re an American. Simple as that.
Or is it? Consider the actual wording: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.”
Seems pretty cut and dry, but check out that crucial clause: “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
That’s the same argument Von Spakovsky makes. They both engage in semantic contortions to argue that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” negate the plain words of the first phrase, ”All persons born or naturalized in the United States.” It’s typical “originalist” bullshit, twisting the words and phrases of the Constitution to manufacture an “interpretation” that supports their anti-democratic and often bigoted beliefs.
The leading practitioner of this, before Clarence Thomas and John Roberts, was Justice Lewis Powell, whose August 1971 memo to the US Chamber of Commerce was the “Master Plan” for this precise redirecting of the conservative movement to achieve a change in Constitutional principles by using misinterpretation. The Lever’s “Master Plan” series of podcast the past several weeks lays out this history in detail. As The Lever puts it, Powel’s plan legalized corruption of the USA political and economic systems. At the very least, listen to Episode 3: The Powell Memo and Episode 4: The Task Force That Took Over America: How a radical secret memo went from idea to reality.
Don’t for a minute think that the Trump regime will stop at stripping USA citizenship from people who have taken the civics lessons, passed the tests, and sworn the oath to become American citizens. A large number of readers may be too young to remember but former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, after becoming the Republican nominee for vice-president in the 2008 presidential campaign (with John McCain nominee for President) pushed the idea that many leftists, liberals and Democrats are not “real Americans.” This sounded like typical “red meat for the base” hyperbole, but we have to face the fact that it did in fact appeal to the base. And it led to other manifestations, such as the meme among the right-wing that Brack Obama was not a USA citizen and therefore ineligible to be President (with Trump as one of the most prominent proponents), and that their country “had been taken away from them.”
It’s just a matter of time before the Trump regime will begin attacking the citizenship of its most powerful critics and opponents.
Addendum:
At 55:31 in the video below, Lincoln scholar Allen Guelzo explains why the United States is based on a proposition — that all humans are created equal — and that anyone who accepts that proposition is welcome to become a citizen.
This is why any attack on immigrants is also an attack on the experiment in self-government the United States embodies. Are we a torch to the rest of the world, or not? What message is sent if we allow Trump and his movement to basically eliminate immigration, including mass imprisonment and deportation of millions of people, and even denial of “birth-right” citizenship to migrant children born in the United States?
Please listen to Guelzo explain so much better and more beautifully than I do.
What was the American Civil War Really About? with Allen Guelzo (video — start at 55:31)
