How US birthright citizenship evolved

US citizenship through birth comes via the 14th Amendment , ratified after the Civil War to secure US citizenship for newly freed black slaves. It later was used to guarantee citizenship to all babies born on US soil after court challenges.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, radical Republicans in Congress sought to push through a series of constitutional protections for newly emancipated black slaves. The 13th Amendment, which was ratified in December 1865, outlawed slavery. The 14th Amendment, ratified in July 1868, assured citizenship for all, including blacks.

And the 15th Amendment, ratified in February 1870, awarded voting rights to black men, stating those rights should not be denied based on “race, colour or previous condition of servitude.”

By extending citizenship to those born in the US, the amendment nullified the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that those descended from slaves could not be citizens.

Dred Scott and his wife Harriet were slaves who sued for their freedom after they were taken from the slave state of Missouri to the non-slave territories of Wisconsin and Illinois where slavery had been prohibited by the Missouri Compromise.

Despite the Citizenship Clause and equal protections afforded under the 14th Amendment, Native Americans were consistently denied the benefits of US birthright citizenship and it took decades for them to receive full citizenship.

Congress granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the US in 1924.

The idea that the children of immigrants born in the US were automatically US citizens remained unclear until 1898.

That’s when the US Supreme Court ruled that San Franciscoborn Wong Kim Ark was a US citizen because he was born in the US

The federal government had tried to deny the son of Chinese immigrants re-entry in the U.S. after a trip abroad on grounds he wasn’t a citizen under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Still, US-born Mexican-Americans in the 1930s were denied citizenship protections when authorities in California and Texas deported them to Mexico during the Great Depression.

US-born Japanese-Americans were denied citizenship protections when they were forced into Japanese internment camps during World War II.

Any executive order by President Donald Trump or any president could be subjected to a judicial challenge and there are many articles in the Constitution that would make a fight against the citizenship clause difficult. Besides the 14th Amendment itself, Hoffman said an executive order banning the citizenship clause would violate Article 2 of the Constitution AP

ALBUQUERQUE: