Under the radar ICE raids and SCOTUS’ Birthright Citizenship Decision
Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.
This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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ICE Detained 10,000 People in 5 Days After White House Ordered Surge in Arrests
Driven by a massive funding boost from Congress, encouragement from the Supreme Court doing its best to uphold the mass deportation agenda, and by the hateful ravings of the pack of fascists in the White House, a massive surge in ICE raids led to the imprisonment of ten thousand children and adults in the first few days of July. More diffuse (and therefore harder to document) than the surges earlier in the year, these operations targeted cities and towns across the nation, including in Florida, Montana, California, and Wisconsin.
Voces de la Frontera hosted a press conference in Milwaukee, WI with testimony from victims of violent ICE arrests. ICE agents broke the windows of one vehicle, hauled the adults from the car, and left two small children alone in the back seat, surrounded by broken glass. A woman described being forced into a position where she couldn’t breathe for so long she was forced to bite the hand of the agent holding her to get him to let go. These are just a couple of examples; the stories of brutality are sickening and seemingly endless.
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Another New York resident says he was warned by officers after criticizing ICE
For months ICE has been touting the way it is using facial recognition and other advanced surveillance capabilities to target immigrants and activists. We’re starting to see the results of this new Stasi approach extended to ordinary civilians, and it is terrifying. Residents from upstate New York are finding federal agents showing up at their homes, their workplaces, and wherever they go simply because they engaged in (what ought to be) protected First Amendment speech, such as writing letters critical of the regime.
David Streever, of Rochester New York, may become the first one to test the limits and legality of this state surveillance in court. After agents showed up at his home with written attempts at intimidation, the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a lawsuit on Streever’s behalf asserting that the agents’ behavior was an illegal violation of his First Amendment rights.
Action item: ACLU Toolkit to join an anti FLOCK group in your state
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SCOTUS Birthright Citizenship decision
How did this case arise?
Trump signed Executive Order 14160 the day after his second inauguration, directing federal agencies to stop recognizing citizenship for children born to undocumented parents or parents on temporary visas. The plaintiff who took it down used a pseudonym: Barbara fled the Mara 18 gang in Honduras with her husband and three children, settled in New Hampshire, and was pregnant when she learned Trump’s order claimed her unborn child wouldn’t be American.
A federal judge sided with her and the ACLU. The case climbed to the Supreme Court, which on the way there had already gutted nationwide injunctions in the related case Trump v. CASA — a procedural ruling that forced Barbara’s lawyers to refile as a class action just to keep the fight alive.
Decision Overview
The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the US remain citizens at birth. The chief justice didn’t hedge. Roberts wrote “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
In Trump v. Barbara (Birthright Citizenship) (25-365), the Court split 6-3, with Roberts joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson finding the president’s executive order unconstitutional, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote separately that the order violates federal law. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
This decision will protect the citizenship of about a quarter million babies born each year. However, the issue is not settled. House Speaker Mike Johnson has confirmed that House Republicans are examining legal strategies to get around the Court’s ruling.
Breakdown of Opinions and Analysis
How did each side form its majority or dissenting opinions? Both used much of the same source material, primarily the 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark (which has stood since 1898). Eight U.S.C. § 1401(a) codifies it, in which a person born in the United States to parents of Chinese descent was held to be a citizen, but each opinion assembled different legal worlds from it. The Roberts majority treated birth in the United States, coupled with subjection to U.S. sovereign authority, as enough to establish citizenship under the 14th Amendment.
Dissents, on the other hand, focused on a more demanding concept of allegiance, especially for children of temporary visitors and unlawfully present parents.
To better understand how each side shaped differing opinions from the same source material, It is helpful to examine the differences of each in length, vocabulary, precedent use, and conceptual structure as justification and rationale for their conclusions. The majority opinion is relatively compact in length, while the dissents supply most of the historical excavation and counter-history. Thomas’ dissent was more than three-and-a-half times the length of the Roberts majority.
In the vocabulary used by the Roberts majority, territorial/common-law terms (the nature of birthright citizenship at the founding) accounted for 29.5% of the conceptual structure in his opinion. In the dissents, the same accounted for only 9.3%. A larger share of their vocabulary referenced domicile (where one makes their permanent home), exclusive allegiance, immigration status, and tribal-citizenship exception analogies.
Revisionist History, Revisionist Precedent
The dissents also moved in the opposite direction on domicile and immigration-status language.
Allegiance is the notable counterexample. The Roberts majority used allegiance much more intensively than the dissents, supporting the point that the majority did not avoid allegiance; it defined it through birth, protection, and territorial jurisdiction rather than through parental domicile or exclusive national allegiance.
Both sides argued that US v. Kim Ark supported their positions. Kavanaugh’s separate opinion had the highest relative mention of this precedent (17 times) given the briefness of his opinion, in which he argued that Wong Kim Ark was not inconsistent with his view that birthright citizenship was not constitutionally guaranteed.
Further Analysis: 5-4 Podcast Episode, SCOTUS Blog, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
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Developing Story: This week, in Houston TX, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by ICE. We are following this story and will bring you more information next week.
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Action items:
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