INSIDE OUR SCHOOLS
(Photo – Pixel)
Over the last few months, we have witnessed a rapid expansion of federal policing power with virtually no oversight from the communities in which these federal police operate. I believe a country has the right to enforce its laws, but it concerns me deeply when that enforcement crosses the line into lawlessness.
By Oliver Grande
When immigrants and naturalized citizens are detained without due process, when birthright citizens are harassed or wrongly targeted, and when birthright citizenship itself is called into question, that is when everyone should be outraged. I do not want ever to live in a country where my constitutional and natural rights are conditional.
The justification for this terrifying expansion is to carry out the largest deportation in U.S. history of non-U.S. citizens. It is easy to feel these events have no relevance to you, especially if you are a U.S. citizen. But with President T.’s unconstitutional executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, and prioritize the denaturalization of up to 25 million U.S citizens, and with his threats to deport U.S. citizens to overseas prisons, every citizen in America is at risk. U.S citizens could experience masked agents stopping them on the streets with no due process, imprisonment in an immigration camp or El Salvador megaprison, and expulsion from the United States.
Under the veil of national security and America First, the government expects us to stand idly by as our citizenship and natural rights are at the mercy of the President and any future administration. If birthright citizenship ends, no constitutional right is guaranteed to anyone in the country. Imagine the unthinkable: American citizens stripped of their citizenship, becoming stateless, deported, and “repatriated” to places they have never known because the government says they no longer belong. If you think this won’t happen, it already has.
The 14th Amendment
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The 14th Amendment was written after the Civil War to guarantee that citizenship could not be denied based on ethnicity, ancestry, class, or political climate. It was meant to end the legal limbo that enslaved Black Americans and other marginalized people faced.
Before this amendment, citizenship was given at the discretion of the federal or state government. Enslaved people were denied personhood. In the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling, the Supreme Court declared that Black people, free or enslaved, could not be citizens, and it limited citizenship to whites only. This interpretation was so extreme and dehumanizing it was a catalyst for the Civil War.
Removing This Guarantee Is a Threat
Destroying the 14th amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship not only harms undocumented families or recent immigrants. It threatens the citizenship and safety of Americans born here.
It creates an illegal fiat, where rights are handed out based on loyalty, ethnicity, class, or ideology. It opens the door to political and systemic exclusion.
In the 1849 California state constitution, due to the lobbying of former Mexican citizens now American citizens per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, individual Native Americans only could be given citizenship based on a two-thirds vote from the state senate. No Native Americans ever were given citizenship from this clause. Birthright citizenship would not be extended to Native Americans until 1924, and the fight for voting rights would follow.
Wong Kim Ark
In United States vs Wong Kim Ark (1898), the Supreme Court confirmed that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children born in the U.S. regardless of their parents’ nationality, and set the foundation for modern birthright citizenship. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents, but his citizenship was questioned due to his ethnicity. At the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act sought to limit Chinese immigration to the United States using economic and racial arguments.
The Court ruled in Wong Kim Ark’s favor, reaffirming that the language of the 14th Amendment was clear: Wong Kim Ark was born on U.S. soil and, at the time of his birth, he was subject to the laws and jurisdiction of the U.S. This ruling set the foundation for more than a century of constitutional understanding.
If we throw this out now, we are not just reinterpreting the law, we are actively ignoring precedent, inviting legal chaos, destroying the 14 amendment and taking America back to a time when citizenship was limited by gender and ethnicity. If Wong Kim Ark was right then, he is right forever. If we foolishly regress on this decision, a constitutional amendment is needed, not an executive order.
An Attempt to Normalize
The President has made threats to send citizens to overseas prisons and take away citizenship of his enemies. This is an attempt to normalize the expulsion and revocation of citizenship for running afoul of authority.
The President also has said he will prioritize denaturalization, which is the process of stripping citizenship of people that immigrated legally and have become citizens. This puts 25 million people at risk and will surely have a chilling effect on naturalized citizens’ ability to engage in activity not approved by the administration.
Statelessness
Ending birthright citizenship would throw millions of newborn Americans into limbo. If citizenship is no longer protected by the 14th Amendment, how will it be determined?
Will blood tests or genealogists need to be consulted for every birth? Will we fast track babies for deportation? Will babies be called to the witness stand in a complex, expensive, ever changing legal system?
The result would be statelessness: children born with no legal nationality. Stateless people are often denied education, healthcare, and identification. They can’t vote. They cannot leave or reenter the country. They are invisible to the law.
When citizenship becomes conditional, it becomes a weapon. It can be revoked. It can be denied. It can be used to punish dissenters, activists, and “unwanted” populations.
That is not how democracy works.
Citizenship is not only about protection from deportation. It must include the right of return for all citizens abroad, due process, and protections against being wrongly targeted by federal agencies.
We must defend what citizenship means, and ensure that no person ever is denied natural birthright to citizenship and freedom.
The 14th Amendment was created in the shadow of slavery and genocide to ensure that the government could never erase your identity. Birthright citizenship is the last safeguard against authoritarianism.
So I urge you to defend your 14th Amendment. Call your representatives. It doesn’t matter who you are or who they are. Demand that they protect the rights of anyone born here.
Birthright citizenship is not just about immigration it is about whether we remain a nation of laws, equality, and civil rights.
If we do not stand now, we will watch the line between citizen and outsider be redrawn by those who seek control, not justice.
That is not the future we should accept.
That is not the country we should become.
What good is any of the Constitution if the 14th Amendment can be destroyed by executive order? What good is anything if anyone can be stripped of their status and basic human rights?
If citizenship can be taken from one of us, it can be taken from all of us.
Oliver Grande is an incoming Senior at Temple City High School and a member of California Assemblymember Mike Fong’s Youth Leaders Program. He has a passion for history and law and is the founder of his School’s Law Club. In his free time Oliver enjoys running, practicing trumpet, and listening to music.
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