Aoki Center and Coalition of Scholars File Amicus Brief in Birthright Citizenship Case
On Feb. 25, the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies at UC Davis School of Law and a coalition of constitutional, civil rights, and other scholars led by Professor Evelyn M. Rangel-Medina filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara. A team from Curtis, Mallet-Prevost, Colt and Mosle LLP acted as pro bono counsel. The question presented in that case is whether President Trump’s Executive Order 14,160, aimed at ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented parents or those with temporary legal status, violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).
The District Court for the District of New Hampshire certified a nationwide class of babies that would be covered by the Executive Order and preliminarily enjoined the order—joining every court that has reached the question in holding that it violates the Fourteenth Amendment and the INA. The amicus brief argues that the Executive Order threatens to re-create the very lineage-based citizenship structure that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to repudiate, because of the order’s disparate impact on racial minorities particularly descendants of Latino/e immigrants. The brief also presents demographic data of the disparate impact and elaborates on the potential for intrafamilial and intergenerational harm.