It’s becoming increasingly clear that this election season will be an all-out assault on immigrants. Republican-led states are suing to stop noncitizen spouses of United States citizens from having a path to legal residency, and conservative think tanks are calling to end birthright citizenship. And for a nice throwback feel, a major Republican organization is levying a racist attack against Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris.
On Aug. 19, the Department of Homeland Security implemented the Keeping Families Together initiative, allowing noncitizen spouses and stepchildren of U.S. citizens to apply for “parole in place.” Here, “parole” refers to DHS’s statutory authority to allow undocumented people to remain in the county on a temporary, case-by-case basis for “urgent humanitarian reasons” or “significant public benefit.” To be eligible, noncitizen spouses must have been here continuously since 2014, have no disqualifying criminal history, and undergo background checks and security vetting. The grant of parole is not automatic—DHS must evaluate each application.
Being granted parole is only the beginning of a lengthy process. Indeed, all a grant of parole does is let an applicant apply for lawful permanent resident status without first leaving the country to be processed through a consulate overseas. People still have to meet all the criteria for lawful residency and go through that application as well. It remains a grueling process, but it allows families to remain intact while noncitizen family members go through the immigration process.
But even this tiny step is too much for Republicans. Within four days, 16 GOP-led states filed suit in the Tyler Division of the Eastern District of Texas federal court, which has only two judges, both of whom are Trump appointees. The Texas federal courts refuse to curb judge shopping—filing in small Texas courthouses with only one or two hard-right judges, thus guaranteeing a sympathetic ear—so it is no surprise those states, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, chose to bring the case there.
Texas and friends raised their usual litany of alleged harms—namely, that states have to spend tax dollars they can never recoup on undocumented immigrants and that their presence increases crime and drug trafficking. However, neither claim is true. Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in taxes in 2022 while being unable to avail themselves of most public welfare programs those taxes pay for. In 40 states—including every state that filed this lawsuit—undocumented immigrants pay taxes at a higher rate than the top 1% of state taxpayers. As far as crime, studies show that an influx of undocumented immigrants does not increase violent crime, and undocumented immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to be incarcerated.
Despite that the lawsuit hinged on these nonexistent harms, it took only two days for Judge J. Campbell Barker, who previously struck down the COVID-19 eviction moratorium and recently threw out a major Biden administration labor rule, to temporarily block the rule from taking effect.
In gloating over the victory, Paxton made sure to thank America First Legal, the right-wing law group founded by anti-immigrant ghoul and former top Trump adviser Stephen Miller. Miller is one of the architects of Trump’s plan to use military and police personnel to conduct large-scale violent deportations in a future administration.
Until last month, America First Legal was on the advisory board of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to remake America in Trump’s image. But when Trump began trying to distance himself from the project after people realized how radical it is, Miller and America First Legal followed suit. Miller’s protestations that he had “zero involvement” with Project 2025 are comical, given he appeared in a recruitment video for it. America First Legal’s vice president, Gene Hamilton, wrote Project 2025’s chapter on overhauling the Department of Justice. Hamilton is also one of the attorneys for Texas in the parole case and, when he was in the DOJ during the Trump administration, served as Miller’s sounding board for anti-immigrant proposals.
Even without America First Legal, Project 2025 has other hard-line anti-immigrant partners willing to call for the end of birthright citizenship, even though it is guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment: “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 Heritage Foundation itself has long beat the drum against birthright citizenship. As the watchdog organization Media Matters for America found, John Eastman wrote a report for Heritage arguing against it back in 2006. Eastman later went to the Claremont Institute, another Project 2025 partner, and continued his crusade there. Yet another Project 2025 partner, the Center for Immigration Studies, has dozens of posts on its website attacking birthright citizenship.
Not content to be outdone by a think tank, the National Federation of Republican Assemblies has a platform stating that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris and former Republican presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy are not eligible to be president because their parents were not American citizens at the time of their birth. To get here, NFRA has to ignore the text of the Fourteenth Amendment, instead relying on several cases that predate the amendment, including the Dred Scott decision. Dred Scott came down a few years before the Civil War and held that Black people could not be citizens.
Past its stunning racism, leaning on this case makes no sense. First, the Fourteenth Amendment repudiated it, granting citizenship to everyone born here, regardless of race or parentage. Next, whether an enslaved Black person could be a citizen has nothing to do with whether a child of noncitizens can be a citizen. Those ideas collide only in the racist fever swamps of Republican minds.
While all of these ideas are fringe, they’re not being pushed only by people on the far-right fringe. The Heritage Foundation is a longtime leading light of the conservative movement. Miller would no doubt have a senior role in a future Trump administration, and NFRA counts among its members and boosters former President Ronald Reagan, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, Sen. Rand Paul, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. And of course, Trump himself has made ending birthright citizenship a centerpiece of his 2024 campaign.
Conservatives are engaged in a comprehensive push to marginalize and terrify immigrants, and if Trump wins, there will be no stopping them.
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