COMMENTARY President Trump's Supreme Court intimidation bid on birthright citizenship risks reminding the justices — and the world — of the Dominican Republic's thuggish repeal of jus soli 13 years ago.
It’s of course wholly appropriate if not admirable for any American to want to sit in on oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court. We should all do it sometime.
But if you think President Donald Trump wanted to set a Boy Scout-style example of civic engagement this week when he attended SCOTUS’ hearing on birthright citizenship, then you probably also believe YouTube consults Ms. Rachel when it writes algorithms for children.
Trump — the first sitting president to ever sit in on the high court proceedings — was there to do the Trump thing: bully. He hoped to intimidate the justices into greenlighting his bid to end constitutional birthright citizenship after they blocked his unconstitutional tariffs six weeks ago.
But, as is so often the case with Trump, it may backfire — not just because most U.S. Supreme Court members probably don’t appreciate a chief executive with a grudge glaring at them as they question lawyers, but because his behavior risked reminding the world of the thuggish way birthright citizenship was ended a decade ago in another country: the Dominican Republic.
READ MORE: Trump betrays MAGA — and the hemisphere — on birthright citizenship
In 2010, the Dominican Republic canceled universal jus soli. That’s the automatic citizenship a nation grants anyone born on its soil, including children of undocumented migrants — a birthright enshrined in the constitutions of the U.S. (in the 14th Amendment) and 34 other countries.
The Dominican Republic’s termination of jus soli per se wasn’t all that earthshaking. After all, most countries don’t offer it. But what the D.R. did three years later sparked international outrage.
In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s high court, stunningly, made the birthright citizenship removal retroactive — all the way back to 1929. That meant that almost a quarter million people who had been born to undocumented migrants in the D.R. over almost a century were suddenly stripped of their citizenship.
They were, in effect, rendered stateless human beings ripe for deportation.
It suddenly dawned on anyone who hadn’t already figured it out that the Dominican Republic's real motive for ending birthright citizenship was racist.
The Dominican Republic shares the Caribbean island of Hispaniola with Haiti. So it was no surprise that almost 90% of those affected by the monstrous decision were Black Dominicans of Haitian descent.
Meaning, it suddenly dawned on anyone who hadn’t already figured it out that the D.R.’s real but unspoken motive for ending birthright citizenship was racist.
Global backlash
The global backlash was so loud — the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the move — that the following year the Dominican Republic had to backtrack and create mechanisms allowing the suddenly hundreds of thousands of personae non grata to re-apply for citizenship.
Since then, that effort to right the wrong has been half-hearted at best — and Haitian border towns report that eligible Haitian Dominicans are still being deported from the D.R. in large numbers.
All of which itself is a reminder that Trump’s own executive-order campaign to repeal birthright citizenship, like his sweeping crusade to deport undocumented migrants, carries as many racist, especially anti-Latino overtones as a Nick Fuentes podcast. (And it too is Haitian-tinged — or did you miss Trump’s ogreish lie about Haitian migrants eating people’s pets in Ohio?)
Per usual, cruelty is part of the package deal — in this case, the prospect of legions of infants coming into the world as stateless as those who were left bereft of a country by the Dominican Republic in 2013.
There’s a reason 30 of the 35 nations that confer birthright citizenship are in the western hemisphere. Aside from the fact that it helped populate countries in the Americas — and amid the U.S.’s slowing population growth, that still matters — it reflects the New World’s democratic ideal that the humblest newborn belongs as surely as the offspring of aristocrats do.
That’s why the U.S. codified it in the 14th Amendment right after the Civil War: it was a way of resolving, post-slavery, that America really was serious about the egalitarian ethos stamped in its Declaration of Independence.
After this week’s oral arguments, SCOTUS watchers say most of the justices seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments that the 14th Amendment actually excludes birthright citizenship.
Trump, they say, will likely lose — and we can only hope he does, because if the court rules in his favor, the U.S. won’t look much better than the Dominican Republic.
And America won’t look as much like a part of the Americas.
