Connecticut leaders, legal experts and community organizers are adding to the national conversation surrounding the birthright citizenship case that the U.S. Supreme Court started hearing arguments for on Wednesday.
Though the justices are not expected to make a decision on the case for at least another few months, the potential outcome is already casting a cloud over a youth-led pro-immigrant group in Connecticut.
Connecticut Students for a Dream, which advocates for residents brought to the U.S. as children, represents Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival status recipients and many others who could be affected by the decision.
Director Tabitha Sookdeo said the court could make the future foggy for its members, including college students who want to start a family, or students whose future siblings may be born in the U.S.
“I think there'd be lots of questions around, ‘how would you even implement something like this?’” Sookdeo said. “Being born in the states and growing up and only knowing life in America? One might call themselves an American culturally… It's just confusing.”
The confusion would trickle down to hospitals, schools, and public safety, Sookdeo said, ultimately creating chaos in a nation that is already seeing a crackdown on immigration.
“Why would you create a larger undocumented population?” Sookdeo said. “It just doesn't make sense.”
Connecticut Public reached out to Republican groups in Connecticut for comment, including the CT GOP and the CT Senate Republicans, but none responded in the time of this publication.
Facing an uncertain future
Not knowing what the future holds is something Wendy Cardenas does not want for children born in America. Cardenas is the executive director of Make the Road Connecticut, a civil rights group for immigrant and working-class communities.
“As an immigrant from Peru and a DACA recipient, I know firsthand what it means to grow up with uncertainty about your future, and I refuse to accept a system where even children born here are forced to question whether they belong,” Cardenas said. “Every child deserves dignity, stability, and the full rights this country promises.”
Danbury Unites for Immigrants member Carolina Bortolleto said the case goes beyond the impact on children. She said this case is really about whether or not the president can rewrite the Constitution by executive order.
“If the president can decide who is a citizen, if the government can decide who really belongs here,” Bortolleto said, “that is not going to stop at someone who's a child of immigrants.”
Bortolleto said Connecticut’s immigrant residents should keep in mind that the executive order has been challenged from the start, so until the Supreme Court justices reach a decision, birthright citizenship is still enshrined in the constitution.
“It’s going to be a long fight to take [birthright citizenship] away,” Bortolleto said.
The legal point of view
The Trump administration's attempts to end birthright citizenship makes no sense to Glenn Formica, an immigration attorney in Connecticut and the legal director of the American Immigrant Law Clinic.
“The concept of having undocumented generations in this country is ridiculous,” Formica said. “It’s unthinkable.”
Children of undocumented immigrants, and people here on temporary visas, all contribute to the country’s workforce, economy and diverse culture, Formica said. Without their citizenship status, Formica said he can’t imagine what the country would look like, making this case a particularly important one for people to pay attention to.
“Whenever you have a decision in front of the Supreme Court that could fundamentally change rights for a vast majority of citizens, those are the decisions above all other decisions you should pay the most attention to,” Formica said. “I can't think of a decision that's more important at the moment.”
Attorney General William Tong echoed the sentiment, stating that the president’s executive order was an “illegal attempt to rewrite the constitution.”
“The President’s executive order redefining birthright citizenship violates our Constitution, federal statutes, and the rule that has governed our Nation for more than 150 years,” Tong said in a joint statement with 23 other attorneys general.
“We were proud to lead the fight against this unlawful order, and grateful for the injunctions we obtained that prevented this action from ever taking effect,” the attorneys general said. “We are optimistic the U.S. Supreme Court will agree with every judge to consider this executive order on the merits and hold that it violates this fundamental constitutional right.”
Kica Matos, a Connecticut resident and President of the National Immigration Law Center, said arguments in court on Wednesday were unprecedented.
“For the first time in American history, a sitting president physically sat inside the Supreme Court chamber as his administration asked the justices to undo more than 150 years of constitutional law,” Matos said in a written statement. “We should interpret this for what it is: a warning to the Court and a hallmark of authoritarian intimidation.”
Matos said ending birthright citizenship would create a permanent underclass of people who are born and raised in American communities that are denied their rights as citizens.
“Let us hope that the Supreme Court does what every lower court has already done: reject this unprecedented power grab, reaffirm that the 14th Amendment means what it says and remind this Administration that the Constitution cannot be signed away with a pen on Inauguration Day,” she said.
Several Yale Law School faculty and students have also been outspoken about the executive order, primarily looking at the legality of its use to change the interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
Yale law professor Jed Rubenfeld, who supports eliminating birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, said that “the court will likely hold that enacting that policy into law would take a constitutional amendment, not an executive order.”
