Donald Trump and maga Republicans must obey the Constitution and support Equal Protection 14th Amendment

Attack on birthright citizenship highlights Trump’s white nationalist ambitions

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Carlos de Loera

In the summer of 1868, the 14th Amendment was ratified, granting birthright citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States.”

Crafted in the aftermath of the Civil War, the landmark legislation was aimed at providing citizenship to formerly enslaved people. The amendment directly undid the ruling of the 1857, U.S. Supreme Court case of Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which stated that enslaved people were not U.S. citizens.

More than 150 years after the amendment’s ratification, Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025, that offered a redefined interpretation of who exactly is entitled to birthright citizenship.

The proposed presidential directive suggested that citizenship should not be extended to children born within the U.S. or its territories to parents who are undocumented or have temporary visas.

The order — which would affect all children born to parents without permanent legal status in the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025 — argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

More than 150 years after the amendment’s ratification, Donald  Trump signed an executive order in January 2025, that offered a redefined interpretation of who exactly is entitled to birthright citizenship.

The proposed presidential directive suggested that citizenship should not be extended to children born within the U.S. or its territories to parents who are undocumented or have temporary visas.

The order — which would affect all children born to parents without permanent legal status in the U.S. after Feb. 19, 2025 — argued that “the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

This retconning of the 14th Amendment aligns with the Trump administration’s continued crusade to demonize nonwhite citizens, which kicked off when he first ran for president in 2015.

The administration has continually placed travel bans on Muslim-majority countries; scaled back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures at the federal level; tried to craft immigration and refugee services in a way that prioritizes white people; perpetuated the “anchor baby” myth; ramped up spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement; attempted to expedite deportations; created an increased surveillance state on undocumented people as ICE raids have besieged immigrant communities over the last year; and housed detained migrants in poorly and dangerously run detention centers.

Stephen Miller, the front man for Trump’s deportation campaign, claimed that the U.S. would essentially be a utopia if there were no immigrants.

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan has openly shown contempt for judges’ rulings on deportation processes when dealing with Latino immigrants.

With the help of other cronies like Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Kash Patel, Brendan Carr, Marco Rubio and Karoline Leavitt, the Trump administration has virtually crafted the Avengers of white nationalism.

Immediately after the order’s signing, several federal judges from across the country blocked its implementation, ruling that it’s unconstitutional. However, in June the Supreme Court ruled that district courts couldn’t authorize nationwide injunctions of the executive order.

After that decision, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a nationwide class-action lawsuit — officially known as Trump vs. Barbara — to block Trump’s executive order last June in New Hampshire on behalf of all the children who would be affected by the directive. The district court judge presiding over the case granted a preliminary injunction, which prevented the order from being enforced. In December, it was announced that the Supreme Court would review the district court’s ruling.

On April 1, the Supreme Court was presented with oral arguments from both sides — though a decision on the case will not be reached until the end of the Supreme Court’s session in late June or early July.

Ahead of these presentations, the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, Cody Wofsy, spoke with The Times about the case.

Wofsy explained that the only legally sound way for the executive order to be implemented would be through an official amendment to the Constitution, which would need to be approved by the states. He highly doubted something like that would even pass.

However, the attorney noted that a lack of legality wouldn’t necessarily stop the Trump administration from denying people citizenship.

“If there were no lawsuits, the government would be treating all these children as if they were not citizens,” Wofsy said. “What I’m saying is that’s illegal, but that the government does illegal things sometimes.”

Wofsy also further delved into the particularities of the court case, stating that the Trump administration wants to require that parents of babies born in the U.S. be “domiciled” in the country.

“That means somebody who resides here and has the intention to reside here indefinitely,” he said. “One problem for [the Trump administration] is that for most of the babies who are being targeted by the executive order, their parents are domiciled here.”

Additionally, he noted that there is currently no domicile requirement within the 14th Amendment and that there is already legal precedent for a constitutional interpretation that asserted that stance.

The 1898, Supreme Court case of United States vs. Wong Kim Ark affirmed the right to citizenship of a child born in California to two parents who were Chinese nationals. The landmark ruling set the legal groundwork for any child born within the U.S. to be considered a citizen, regardless of their parents’ residence status.

The Supreme Court brief put forth by the Trump administration mentioned that court case but argued that the ruling “does not cover children of aliens who are not ‘permitted by the United States to reside here.’”

Wofsy called out the legal move for its perversion of what political representation should be.

“Citizenship is not a policy tool to be wielded just because the people temporarily in office would rather the electorate looked different from the way it does,” he said. “[In] America, the people elect their representatives, the representatives do not pick who the people are going to be.”

A positive outcome for the Trump administration could create a permanent second‑class caste of people whose citizenship can be questioned.

“This would be the starting gun to a much broader attack on citizenship and belonging in this country more generally,” Wofsy said. “And we know who the targets of those attacks would be. It would be communities of color. It would be vulnerable populations in this country who already have their citizenship and their belonging in America questioned on a regular basis.”

In terms of enforcement, this new reality would make it so that the thousands of children born monthly since Feb. 19, 2025, would effectively be rendered undocumented immigrants, with virtually no avenue to get any type of legal status.

Wofsy said these kids would be “subject to immediate harms” and that they could be arrested, detained and deported from the U.S.

“They’re going to grow up living in fear of immigration enforcement and having their families torn apart,” he noted. “It also means they’d be denied passports, ordinary access, Social Security cards and various kinds of programs, including early life nutrition as they get older.”

The executive order’s implementation could also create a logistical nightmare for people who have nothing to do with those who are being targeted. For example, it could affect members of religious communities that may not have traditional documentation and people who’ve lost their documentation due to natural disasters.

“What if you need to prove the immigration status of your parents, maybe decades before questions are being raised about citizenship?” Wofsy said. “[It could] potentially strip citizenship from unknown numbers of people who not only should be citizens under the Constitution as it’s written, but even should be citizens under the executive order rules but maybe can’t prove it.”

Wofsy called the Trump administration the “most anti-immigrant administration that we’ve seen in at least 100 years” and pointed at the ultimate goal of all its restrictive policies.

“They want to turn the clock back to a time when the country was less free, less equal and more than anything more white,” he said. “Overall, it is a vision of America that says that nonwhite populations coming here, enjoying the fabric of America, is a bad thing. I don’t think that is what the American people believe. I don’t think that’s what they voted for and I do not think that this assault on birthright citizenship reflects American values.”

Bring illegally deported migrants home: The release of Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia must be facilitated by evil Donald Trump

 Appreciate the extraordinary American Civil Liberty Union efforts to put pressure on the evil Trump administration while bringing several law suits to bring Mr. Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the other illegally deported immigrans back to face due process. Opinion echo letters published in the Minnesota Star Tribune. 

El Salvador's Nayib Bukele says he won't return mistakenly deported man to U.S.  The Donald Trump and the Republican administration now claims Kilmar Abrego Garcia wasn’t deported by mistake, as the Justice Department said, but was “the right person sent to the right place.

Bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home❗

This evil deportation was forced without due process on the Japanese-Americans during World War II, when they were rounded up and put in detention camps while German Americans were never treated with the same policy.  In 1798❗, (227 year old) Federalist-controlled Congress passed four laws, known collectively as the Alien and Sedition Acts. These laws raised the residency requirements for citizenship from 5 to 14 years, authorized the president to deport "aliens," and permitted their arrest, imprisonment, and deportation during wartime. The Sedition Act made it a crime for American citizens to "print, utter, or publish...any false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the government. This terrible law puts all Americans at risk for deportation.

Dear Editor: Ironic that the Department of Justice and the Trump administration and the Republican cult are saying they cannot bring back the illegally deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had protected status from deportation and was illegally deported to El Salvador after an “administrative mistake.” 

Even after the Supreme Court recently ruled the government must facilitate his return back to the U.S., their logic to not immediately bring him back is that El Salvador is a sovereign nation and we cannot tell it what to do.

Well, Greenland is part of a sovereign nation, but that doesn’t stop any of the discussions by the administration of our country taking over Greenland by either economic or military action. If the administration really wanted to correct its illegal deportation of Abrego Garcia, Donald Trump could just require his release and return.

From Jan McCarthy, in Eden Prairie, Minnesota 

Dear Editor:  How impotent our commander in chief is that he doesn’t have the power to bring a wrongfully imprisoned man back to the United States❗  From: Kathleen Hermansen, in Apple Valley, Minnesota

Trump oxymoron - an emergency "I did not have to declare"!

Classic oxymoron double speak*

What is an emergency the president says he did not have to declare? Opinion echo published in The Lincoln Journal Star newspaper, in Lincoln, Nebraska. Links the ACLU lawsuit are posted at the end of this letter, written to the editor of The Lincoln Journal Star.  Congress must remove Donald Trump for violating his oath of office, when he created an illegal emergency declaration.

Executive power amok - an emergency when there is none!

An emergency he said was an emergency because he wanted his wall faster.

The majority of America does not believe a border wall will stop drugs or illegal immigration. I don’t recall pictures of all those immigrants carrying drugs and guns as they swim rivers and climb walls.

Facts and history confirm that. Perhaps not the propaganda and fear-mongering that get ratings and money from pitting Americas against each other.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian political institution, published an opinion piece in 2017 that noted: “The reason President Trump’s wall would be a mammoth expenditure (is) that (it) would have little impact on illegal immigration. But perhaps that’s not the point. The campaign’s goal was to plant an image in voters’ minds of what making America great again would look like. The president’s goal may now be to create a symbol, an illustration of a nationalism that says to the world that although people of all kinds may want to come here, America was created by and for Americans.”

Trump is using a declaration of an emergency for his campaign, pure and simple. He is not getting his way with votes. Imagine the coming declarations if he succeeds.

Will we get to vote out Congress members who support this? In these dangerous times, will our congressional representatives support fear or the future of America?

Herbert Abrams, Lincoln Nebraska

*A figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction- Example: CNN reported: Lawsuits challenging Donald Trump's bogus national emergency declaration use his words against him.

• Donald Trump's words are already being used against him in a slew of lawsuits challenging his declaration of a national emergency at the southern border.
• In at least three lawsuits filed in federal court, lawyers seized on Trump's remark during his Friday's press conference announcing the declaration that he "didn't need to" declare a national emergency.
• The American Civil Liberties Union, which has said it will file a lawsuit against the administration this week, has featured the comment in news releases.
• There Is No ‘National Emergency’ at the Border, and Trump’s Declaration Is Illegal by Cecillia Wang

Taking children from parents was Nazi terror now a Trumpian evilism

Taking Children from Their Parents Is a Form of State Terror ~ Masha Gessen* in The New Yorker

Innocent kidnapped immigrant children 

When my kids were fifteen and twelve, we lived through a period during which the Russian government was threatening to take children away from queer parents, and, specifically, threatening to go after my kids. I sent my son, who is adopted, to boarding school in the United States while the rest of us got ready to emigrate.

My biological daughter was less at risk, perhaps even at no risk, and yet the question of whether social services would come knocking sent me into a panic.

One day, about a month and a half before we left Moscow, as I was about to go on a short book trip, my daughter asked what would happen if social services.

Innocent children kidnapped by Trump administration cruelty

He came while I was away. “Will you go crazy?” she asked. I reassured her that a small army of lawyers, activists, and embassy officials stood at the ready and would protect her.

“I know I’ll survive,” she responded dismissively. “I mean, Will you go crazy? Will you lose your mind?”

A twelve-year-old was asking me if I had the mental capacity to survive having my child taken hostage. It was the right question.

Hostage-taking is an instrument of terror. Capturing family members, especially children, is a tried-and-true instrument of totalitarian terror.

Memoirs of Stalinist terror are full of stories of strong men and women disintegrating when their loved ones are threatened: this is the moment when a person will confess to anything.

In fact, the single most searing literary document of Stalinist terror is “Requiem,” a cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova while her son, Lev Gumilev, was in prison.

But, in the official Soviet imagination, it was the Nazis who tortured adults by torturing children. In “Seventeen Moments of Spring,” a fantastically popular miniseries about a Soviet spy in Nazi Germany, a German officer carries a newborn out into the cold of winter in an effort to compel a confession out of his mother who was forced to hear her baby cry.

Last weekend, independent Russian-language media published hundreds of photographs from protests that preceded Monday’s inauguration of Vladimir Putin, who has claimed the office of President for the fourth time. In many of the pictures, Russian police were detaining children: primarily, preteen boys were having their arms twisted behind their backs by police, being dragged and shoved into paddy wagons. According to OVDInfo, a Web site that has been tracking arrests since anti-Putin protests began, six and a half years ago, a hundred and fifty-eight minors were detained by police during the protests, accounting for just less than ten per cent of the day’s arrests.

Ella Paneyakh, a Russian sociologist who studies law-enforcement practices, observed in a Facebook post that the police had clearly been directed to target children. A possible explanation, she suggested, is that social services, which will process the minors, is even less accountable than the regular courts are. 

While Russian activists have learned to make the work of the courts difficult, filing appeals and regularly going all the way to the European Court of Human Rights, there is no role for defense attorneys and no apparent appeals process in the social-services system. The threat is clear: children who have been detained at protests may be removed from their families. At least one parent has already been charged with negligence as a result of his son’s detention at one of the demonstrations last weekend.

Another possible explanation is that Putin and the system he has created have consistently, if not necessarily with conscious intent, restored key mechanisms of Soviet control. The spectacle of children being arrested sends a stronger message than any amount of police violence against adults could do. The threat that children might be removed from their families is likely to compel parents to keep their kids at home next time—and to stay home themselves.

A few hours after Putin took his fourth oath of office, in Moscow, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a law-enforcement conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. He pledged to separate families that are detained crossing the Mexico-U.S. border. “If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you and that child will be separated from you,” Sessions said. The Attorney General did not appear to be unveiling a new policy so much as amplifying a practice that has been adopted by the Trump Administration, which has been separating parents who are in immigration detention from their children. The Times reported in December that the federal government was considering a policy of separating families in order to discourage asylum seekers from entering. 

By that time, nonprofit groups were already raising the alarm about the practice, which they said had affected a number of families. In March, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the hundreds of families that had been separated when they entered the country with the intention of seeking asylum.

The practice, and Sessions’s speech, are explicitly intended as messages to parents who may consider seeking asylum in the United States. The American government has unleashed terror on immigrants, and in doing so has naturally reached for the most effective tools.

*Masha Gessen, a staff writer, is the author of “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.

Where are pro-life advocates when children are brutally treated by ICE?

Judge Calls Trump's Border Separations of Children `Brutal'

Echo essay from Bloomberg News ~By Erik Larson

The Trump administration failed to kill a legal challenge to its practice of separating undocumented parents and children who seek to enter the U.S. to flee persecution at home, with a judge handing an early victory to civil rights activists who say the policy is unconstitutional and cruel.

U.S. District Judge Dana Sabraw in San Diego on Wednesday denied a motion to dismiss the suit, in which the American Civil Liberties Union argues that splitting up families at the border violates their due process rights.

The practice, spearheaded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, caused widespread outrage after images of children in detention centers circulated on social media. The government argues separations are necessary to properly prosecute adults who cross into the U.S. illegally, while activists say children are being used as pawns in an informal policy intended to deter migrants.

“These allegations sufficiently describe government conduct that arbitrarily tears at the sacred bond between parent and child," the judge wrote. The conduct, if true, “is brutal, offensive, and fails to comport with traditional notions of fair play and decency."

Trump’s supporters have for the most part backed his efforts to crack down on the thousands of immigrants who enter the country illegally each month and the millions who are already in the U.S. But courts haven’t been as friendly to his policies, and have so far blocked his move to deport about 800,000 young people known as Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children and have since established their lives here.

Sabraw said the ACLU’s claims are particularly troubling because the plaintiffs in the case had allegedly come to the U.S. seeking asylum out of fear for their well-being in their home countries. The suit applies to migrants who formally present themselves at ports of entry as political refugees as well as those who seek asylum after they are apprehended during illegal border crossings.

“The government actors responsible for the ‘care and custody’ of migrant children have, in fact, become their persecutors," the judge said.

The judge rejected the ACLU’s argument that the separation practice violates the Asylum Act and the Administrative Procedure Act, but gave the rights group permission to amend its complaint to address deficiencies in those claims. The ACLU’s request for an order halting the practice while the case proceeds is pending. 

Also, the group wants families reunited, pending the outcome of the case.

The ACLU alleges that its two lead plaintiffs, women identified as “Ms. L" from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and “Ms. C" from Brazil, along with hundreds of other migrants, have suffered “wrenching separations" from their children for no legitimate purpose. The process will soon become a national policy, they claim, though the U.S. disputes that.

"Today’s ruling could not be stronger, and squarely rejects the Trump administration’s claim that these families lack the constitutional right to remain together," ACLU attorney Lee Gelernt said in in an email.

Homeland Security declined to comment on pending litigation.

Galernt, who argued at a hearing in the case last month, called Trump’s recent claim on Twitter that Democrats are to blame for the policy "absolutely untrue."

"This is a Trump administration policy," Gelernt said.

The ACLU says prior administrations detained migrant families, but didn’t have a practice of forcibly separating parents from their children unless the adults were deemed unfit. The civil rights group claims the U.S. will soon adopt the practice as a formal policy, though the government denies that.

The U.S. “concedes such a policy would be antithetical to the child welfare values imposed on government actors responsible for the care and custody of migrant children," according to the decision.

The two women who brought the complaint were separated from their children after entering the U.S., one through a formal asylum-seeking process at a port of entry and the other by illegally crossing the border.

The border officials "failed to present any evidence to support their assertion that they were simply complying with the statutes" during those separations, the judge said.

The case is L v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 3:18-cv-00428, U.S. District Court, Southern District of California (San Diego).

Political proof that there really is a just God

Federal judge ruled that the Kansas Republican Secretary of State Kris Kobach repeatedly acted “disingenuously” and failed to notify Kansans about their registration

Republican Secretary of State in Kansas, Kris Kobach (aka ~ Dumb-back) is a Donald Trumpzi loyalist who deserves to go to jail for his contempt of supporting voter registration laws.

Reported in Salon.com ~ by Charlie May

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who helped lead President Donald Trump's now-defunct voter fraud commission, was found in contempt of court after failing to comply with a federal judge's orders to notify thousands of residents that they had been registered to vote.

In a scathing ruling, U.S.District Judge Julie Robinson wrote twice that Kobach acted "disingenuously" and that she found "clear and convincing evidence" he disobeyed the court order, according to The Washington Post.

In fact, the order came as a result of a 2016 lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued Kansas based on a 2013 voter ID law that "requires people to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, when they registered to vote for the first time," the Post reported. 

Judge Robinson blocked the law with a preliminary injunction in 2016 and ordered Kobach to notify "some 18,000" voters via a postcard with their registration and polling information.

TWITTER (ACLU) ~ BREAKING: Federal judge finds Kobach in contempt of court for violating the 2016 injunction blocking his documentary proof-of-citizenship law.

This is the same law that blocked more than 35,000 Kansas from registering to vote and that we took to trial in #ACLUvKobach.
5:10 PM - Apr 18, 2018

The ACLU (Civil Liberties Union) argued that Kobach, who is a GOP candidate for governor in Kansas, disobeyed the order and that voters had not received the postcard or any other information in regards to their voting status.

"Kansans have come to expect these postcards to confirm their registration status, and Defendant ensured the Court on the record that they had been sent prior to the 2016 general election,” Robinson wrote in her ruling, according to the Post. "They were not, and the fact that he sent a different notice to those voters does not wholly remove the contempt."

She added that Kobach "willfully failed to make sure that the county election officials were clearly and effectively trained to enforce" the rules of the injunction.

"The official training manual for the counties continued to instruct that all voter registration applicants were required to submit DPOC [documented proof of citizenship] and his efforts to revise these instructions informally and in a piecemeal way led to confusion and misinformation," Robinson wrote.

As a result of the contempt ruling, Kobach was ordered to pay attorney fees for the plaintiffs in the case.

Kobach, who is a close ally of the president, has a well documented track record of attempting to suppress voters with strict ID laws. Last year, while Kobach served as the vice chair of Trump's now-dismantled Election Integrity Commission, he was fined for "misleading the court" in voter ID cases.

Trump's so-called voter fraud commission was actually stacked with architects of voter suppression laws and echoed Trump's claim that 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election, an assertion the commission said it had evidence to prove, but was later unable to. The voter fraud commission also flagged Texans with Hispanic surnames, and experts have warned the commission failed to keep the safety of millions of peoples' data safe. 

Even worse....(wait, there's more!)....Kobach is also a paid Breitbart (aka "barfcart") News columnist, where he's written about his hardline (and cruel) anti-immigration views.

Every day, it's becoming more evident that the American judiciary must become the enforcer of our democracy, before it's completely dismantled by Republicans.  Perhaps, there really is a just political God after all ~ Bless Judge Julie Robinson and the others who have enforced their authorities as America's third branch of government.

Trump pardon of Arizona Joe does irreparable harm to GOP

Donald Trump was wrong to pardon Arizona Joe
Arpaio, the former sheriff of Phoenix who illegally targeted Latinos- and who was sent to federal prison for his crimes.

In the pardon, Donald Trump has negatively branded Republicans as right wing extremists.

Former Arizona sheriff Joe Aripaio- poster for right wing extremism

Indeed, of all the people in the world who understands the importance of "branding", in forming opinions about people and products, it's Donald Trump who should realize how damaging his pardon of the bigot, Arizona Joe, is to the Republican party. 

In this horrible pardon, Arizona Joe is now the poster for right wing extremism, bigotry and racism. There was absolutely no reason to pardon Arizona Joe; but Donald Trump did it just because he could. In so doing, the pardon has branded the Republican party as a safe harbor for extremism, providing a place where all who subscribe to racist thinking can feel like they are protected from being labeled as weirdos. 

“With his Arpaio pardon, Trump has chosen lawlessness over justice, division over unity, hurt over healing,” Cecillia Wang, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Friday. 

“Once again, Donald Trump acted in support of illegal, failed immigration enforcement practices that target people of color and have been struck down by the courts. His pardon of Arpaio is a presidential endorsement of racism.”

Republicans will only be able to crawl out of the Arizona Joe branding nightmare if they reject Donald Trump and his cult followers. Moreover, Americans must demand for Donald Trump to rise to the stature of the office he holds and stop pandering to right wing extremism.

MaineWriter opinion- Donald Trump has done irreparable harm to the GOP brand. Rather than the decades old acronym of "Grand", it is now gasping for air, branded as the "Gone Old Party".