We are all the children of immigrants
For now, our Constitution protects citizenship rights for all born in US
As this piece is being written, the United States Supreme Court is hearing opening arguments in a case that could open the door to limiting or eliminating birthright citizenship in our country.
The truth is, any person born in this country is a citizen. This is a basic and fundamental guarantee in the Constitution, that foundational document every elected official and most appointees (including members of the Supreme Court) swear to uphold.
(A budget request from Homeland Security seeks massive increases for detention and removal, and much smaller amounts to pay for the due process in the nation’s immigration courts. Photo by Chad Stembridge on Unsplash)
At the same time, the House of Representatives is engaged in a process of combing through the president’s spending proposals in advance of a vote.
Trump wants to substantially increase the budget of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency known as ICE, making it the largest department in the federal government.
It would also speed and increase removals while eliminating due process.
These are un-American proposals. Full stop.
If you read The Labor Party’s opening salvo in its No Kings series, you may remember one of the reasons the 13 colonies sought independence and self-government was King George III’s unwillingness to continue to allow English subjects to immigrate here in order to, in John Hancock’s words, expand the young nation’s boundaries.
After 248 years, our physical boundaries have expended from sea to sea, and from Canada in the north to Mexico in the south. Yet the United States continues to benefit from immigration in ways large and small.
As American birth rates slow, immigrants from around the world keep our economy running. Some fill entry-level jobs once performed by the teenage sons and daughters of American citizens. Others bring high-level skills gained in their home countries, but put into practice here to benefit American medicine, technology, science, engineering and more.
American culture is ever-changing because of the influx of people from all over the world. Our food, music, literature, fashion, visual and dramatic arts, and our language would be bland and borning without the influences that immigrants from around the world brought here.
Our eyes have been opened to different religions and of new ways of interacting with people, from those in our own families to complete strangers.
The lack of respect for diversity, equality and inclusion in American society is destroying the very essence of American society, and in a nation without kings, no one leader or ruling party has the right to speak for all Americans, who unless they are members of an indigenous tribe, are descended from immigrants.
By demonizing those who come to find their own version of the American Dream, the Trump administration violates the very essence of democracy.
The case for birthright citizenship
You may not remember, because there have been so many of them, that Trump issued an executive order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” in which he eliminate the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to a baby born to a mother in the U.S. illegally, or legally but without permanent status, if the father was not a citizen.
It was one of the first executive orders of his presidency, issued on the first day of his second term.
Nationally known legal expert Joyce Vance, on her Civil Discourse Substack, asks the question that gets to the heart of the No Kings concept: Does Donald Trump get to decide who is an American?
Her answer, and we concur, is no.
The Supreme Court is considering a case this week that is meant to focus on a very narrow question. The Trump administration is asking that an injunction ordered by one court not be allowed to govern whether the executive order is enacted in other jurisdictions, while numerous lawsuits challenging the executive order are heard in courtrooms around the country.
“It’s … important to consider the context … the reason these parties are in front of the Supreme Court in this case. They’re there because Donald Trump thinks he, and he alone, can walk beyond the boundaries set by our Constitution and our laws and reshape the country in his own image,” Vance wrote.
However, the administration is not asking the court to rule on the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, saying the lower courts should be given the opportunity to make their rulings.
The liberal judges in their questioning seemed to indicate that a decision about lifting the injunction and the protection of birthright citizenship go hand in hand. The government’s lawyer disagrees, of course, since an outright Supreme Court ban would — in normal times — be an end to the administration’s effort, other than an act of Congress.
The states and advocates who have filed suit argue that the government’s case is almost certain to fail on Constitutional grounds, so the stays should be allowed to continue.
Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to hint that he was open to the court being able to rule quickly on the constitutionality question.
Growing immigration crackdown
In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on an anti-immigrant platforms. When he rode down the golden escalator in 2015 and announced his first presidential run, his sights were set on Latin American and Middle Eastern/Muslim immigration.
Eight years later, his “Make America Great Again” campaign had morphed into an movement designed to demonize anyone who was not descended from white European immigrants in the United States for generations.
He and his supporters cherry-picked select, albeit horrific, crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (illegal aliens in their hateful terminology), and paraded the victims’ families in front of TV cameras, telling and retelling the gruesome details and concocting a “massive crime wave” they blamed on “them.”
The United States is home to the world’s largest foreign-born population. Nearly 48 million of its 340 million-person population was born somewhere else. Of that 48 million, about 12 million are believed to be undocumented. The remaining 36 million are split among naturalized citizens, legal permanent residents, holders of green cards, or live here on student and work visas.
In 2022, the last year for which data were available (interestingly, the federal government seemingly no longer records these numbers, or at least shares them), of the 340 million people in the US, 738,000 are undocumented immigrants who have committed a crime (one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. population).
Keep that number in mind for a moment.
During the budget reconciliation process, the House of Representatives this week is preparing to vote on a budget for ICE that increases annual spending for immigrant detention by 360 percent, from $3.4 billion to $12.4 billion a year. Even more eye-opening, a 500 percent increase for transportation and removal, taking a $721 million annual line item to a whopping $14.4 billion through 2029, according to a report by the American Immigrant Council.
While the federal workforce has been slashed across the board since January, the budget for ICE seeks $8 billion to hire 10,000 new ICE officers over the next five years, $858 million for bonuses, and $600 million for the HR staff needed to accomplish this level of hiring.
Let me remind you, Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Tom Homan (the president’s “border czar”) continue to defend the thousands of arrests, deportations and removals — the vast majority of which have been carried out without any due process — because the immigrants they are arresting are the most violent of criminals.
Let’s do the math, shall we? For one year: $12.4 billion for detention. $5 billion for removal. $1.6 billion for ICE officer salaries. $171 million for bonuses. $120 million for HR. That’s a total of $131 billion. If ICE/Homeland Security apprehended every single undocumented immigrant who committed a crime (the vast majority of which are misdemeanor nonviolent offenses), they would spend $177,521.69 per arrest. Of course, ICE will arrest nowhere near 780,000 plus people in a year (and of the ones it does, a very small percentage will be from the miniscule pool of hardened criminal immigrants).
Where’s DOGE when you need them?
But this is only half the problem.
This astronomical increase in enforcement spending is not reflected in the requested increase for immigration court proceedings. That means many more immigrants will be detained, whether here or in foreign nations, for much longer periods of time. The result is basically removal of their rights to due process, whether the administration is successful or not in getting Congress to approve suspension of habeas corpus.
There’s more! In a perverse act of adding insult to injury, Homeland Security’s budget request includes exorbitant increases in the fees to file an application with the government for a visa, green card, permanent resident status, naturalization or amnesty. People who are leaving their home countries with little more than the clothes on their backs will be required to pay thousands of dollars to apply for the privilege of having their request considered. If it is rejected, they don’t get that money back, which effectively leaves them stranded, illegally, in this country and subject to arrest and imprisonment.
It creates a tiered immigration system that benefits wealthy (read, mostly white) immigrants and disenfranchises most immigrants of color. Passing this budget is a giant step in creating a whiter, less diverse nation.
The Constitution puts the power of the purse in Congress’s hands for a reason. Our founders wanted to prevent a president from using the nation’s budget to enact policies that the majority of Americans oppose.
Our increasingly partisan politics now virtually guarantees that the party in the majority has the ability to rubber stamp their president’s budget, as it appears will happen in coming days, because the reconciliation budget now under consideration needs only a majority vote in both the House and Senate to pass.
This Congress has the ability to do what no Congress has done in the country’s 248-year history: to anoint a king.
The Labor Party, like most Americans, can’t even fathom this possibility. We believe our elected leaders, from town councils to the White House, hold their power through the voter. We believe money has perverted the political process and allowed elected officials to enrich themselves while impoverishing the American people.
We support removing corporate money from politics. We believe both of the nation’s major parties have been corrupted by big money and vote accordingly for their donors’ interests rather than their constituents.
We believe No Kings includes the oligarchs like Elon Musk who are co-presidents without accountability to voters. And what is a leader without accountability? A king.
America has never, should never, must never bow to a king.
No Kings Countdown
30 days: Colonists’ breakup letter to King George defines our rights
(Until June 14, the day of Donald Trump’s planned authoritarian military parade, The Labor Party plans to talk about how un-American it is to aspire to be a king. The Labor Party is built by and for working people. We fight for policies that put people over profits. Ours is a grassroots movement fighting for real change. For inquiries, contact Labor Party Media Secretary Neel Sawicky at media@votelabor.org.)