Shortly after the Supreme Court announced in April that it would consider national freezing in the executive order of President Trump that ended the birth citizenship, spoke happily with journalists in the Oval office.
Trump said he was “so happy” that the judges would occupy the issue of citizenship because he had his leg “so misunderstood.” The 14th amendment, he said, for a long time to grant citizenship to anyone born in the United States, is actually “about slavery.”
“It’s not about tourists who enter and touch a piece of sand and, suddenly, there is citizenship,” Trump said, he added, “that’s about slavery.”
For more than a century, most scholars and courts have agreed that he thought that the fourteenth amendment was added to the Constitution after the civil war, in fact it was not about slavery. On the other hand, the courts have a hero that the amendment extended citizens not only to the children of former slaves but also to babies born at the borders of the United States.
The notion that the amendment may not do so, so once a little orthodox theory was considered, promoted by a dark law teacher from California named John Eastman and his colleagues at the Claremont Institute, a group of conservative experts, the same teacher who later provides later that he later provides to provide Trump with legal arguments he used to try to revoke the results of the results of the presidential elections of the presidential elections of 2020.
The history of how the theory moved from the distant edges of the Academy to the Oval Office and, on Thursday, to the Supreme Court, it offers information on how Trump has popularized legal theories once considered unthinkable to justify their immigration policies.
“They have bone push it for decades,” said John Yoo, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, the Law Faculty and a main lawyer in the George W. Bush administration. “However, it was an extravagant idea that only political philosophers would buy the purchase. They finally obtained a president who agrees.”
The White House did not respond to comments requests.
President Trump promoted the theory during his first campaign, but did not act accordingly until his second term. He signed an executive order on his first day to end the citizenship of birth law for the children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign residents.
The legal challenges were fast and emphatic. The challengers pointed out the text of the 14th amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens of the United States and the state in which they reside.”
In oral arguments this week, the judges will mainly consider if federal judges have the power to order these temporary pauses, known as national mandates. But the question of the citizenship of birth law will form the context.
In an interview, Mr. Eastman said he developed his views on the citizenship of birth law after terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.
At that time, Mr. Eastman, who had been an employee of Judge Clarence Thomas, was a law professor at the University of Chapman at Orange County, California, and director of the Constitutional Jurisprudence Center at the Claremont Institute.
At the end of November 2001, a man named Yaser Esam Hamdi was in custody by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to the United States military base/prison in Guantanamo Bay.
The authorities knew that Mr. Hamdi was an American citizen. His mother, a Saudi citizen, had given birth while the family lived in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where Mr. Hamdi worked as a chemical engineer.
Because Mr. Hamdi was an American citizen, the authorities believed that they could no longer sustain him as an “enemy combatant” in Guantanamo Bay, where he was considered out of reach of the full legal protections of federal courts. They transferred him to a Naval Bergantín in Norfolk, Va.
In a 2004 letter in the case of 2004 in the case, Mr. Eastman argued that the idea that citizens automatically conferred all children born on American soil was a “generally accepted but wrong but erroneous interpretation of the amendment 14 that was” incorrect, in a matter of text, historical practice and the “” “” “” “police.
Mr. Eastman was based on the work of a State University of California, Professor of Political Science of San Bernardino, affiliated with the Claremont Institute, Edward J. Erler, who had published the same theory in books in 1997 and 2003.
Mr. Erler, who did not respond to a request for comments, argued that the children of people in the country illegally or temporarily are not automatically citizens.
Athegh The idea that children born in the United States automatically become citizens have deep roots in customary law, it was not adopted in the text of the Constitution until 1868, as part of the 14th amendment. He arrived in a sentence that surpassed Dred Scott, the decision of the Supreme Court of 1857 who affirmed slavery and helped provoke the civil war.
Mr. Eastman said that nowhere the duration of the debate on amendment 14 had agreed to include temporary visitors.
The judges rejected this opinion, discovering that the protections of due process of the Constitution were applied to Mr. Hamdi.
Even so, for years later, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Yoo publicly discussed the issue, with Mr. Eastman arguing his theory that the citizenship of birth rights was not in the Constitution and Mr. Yoo arguing that yes.
For much of that time, the debate felt abstract, said Mr. Yoo, or interest mainly in legal academics.
“He has never had an abstract idea that had policy effects,” he said. “It is as if it almost jump from the review articles of the law to the White House.”
That jump occurred when Trump ran for president in 2015.
In an interview with Fox News personality, Bill O’Reilly, in August 2015, Trump described his plans to review the immigration system. Mr. O’reilly seemed skeptical at the beginning, and then more and more frustrated.
Mr. O’reilly pointed to the 14th amendment as an impediment to Trump’s plan. But Mr. Trump replied: “I think you are wrong about the 14th amendment.”
“I can quote it, do you want me to quote the amendment?” Said O’Reilly, almost screaming. “If you are born here, you are an American, period!”
“But there are many lawyers, many lawyers say that is not the way it is,” Trump replied.
Eastman said Trump referred to “probably” to him, but also to other academics who had published on the subject. He said he wasn’t sure how his views had reached the presidential candidate.
Trump did not pursue a plan to end the citizenship of birth rights in his first mandate. Mr. Eastman said that in 2019 with Attorney General William P. Barr for Mr. Barr’s invitation to discuss a possible executive order on Citizenship of Birth Law, but that nothing came out. Mr. Bar did not respond to a request for comments.
Mr. Eastman said he was “very happy” when Trump announced that he would end the birth citizenship on his first day back in office.
By then, Mr. Eastman and Mr. Trump had a nearby association. Mr. Eastman was one of the architects of a plan to create false boards of Pro-Trump voters in the states that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won and urge Mr. Pence to accept those blackboards while presiding over the certification of the 2020 elections.
A Judge of California recommended that Mr. Eastman be inhebrated on the episode. He said he was appealing, although his California law license is currently inactive as results. He is also fighting the criminal charges that slowly make their way through the State Court in Arizona. (A case against him and other defendants in Georgia seems unlikely to advance).
Mr. Eastman said the president did not consulted him directly on the Birth Law Citizenship Order, but that several of his friends, whom he declined to appoint, were involved. “They knew that my scholarship was a son at the forefront of this,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s order fed a new interest in examining the foundations of the citizenship of birth law, said Ilan Wurman, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and author of a book about the 14th amendment.
“President Trump has an amazing ability to move Overton windows: the problems that people thought they were out of the table are on the table,” Wurman said.
Mr. Wurman argues that a close reading of the 1898 case and the Historical Registry reveals that the Supreme Court has never firmly a hero that children born to those present illegally are citizens.
A wave of friendly letters of the court has brought some of these ideas to the judges, including one of Mr. Eastman.
In a letter to the judges at the end of April, Hey argued that, although the judges had agreed to hear arguments only on the Puse Nationwide in the president’s policy, they should also decide the merits and citizenship of the right of birth.
“There are many people in the country waiting for the resolution of this problem,” he said. “Is the executive order valid or not? And the more we hope, the more dismay is Caaauteted.”
Alan Feuer and Danny Hakim Contributed reports. Julie Tate Contributed research.
