#the 14th amendment

[michaelpaul7]

☝️Pay Attention - they're going to do whatever it takes so they don't lose power.

👇

[onlytiktoks]

The Trump administration had asked the justices to lift a nationwide pause on the policy as lower court challenges continue.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

"When injustice becomes law, resistance becomes a duty" :: Sticker spotted in Bilkent University in Turkey

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 26, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Apr 27, 2025

Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent three U.S. citizens aged 2, 4, and 7 from Louisiana, including one with Stage 4 cancer, to Honduras when they deported their mothers. The three are children of two different mothers who were arrested while checking in with the government as part of their routine process for immigration proceedings. The women and their children were not permitted to speak to family or lawyers before being flown to Honduras. The cancer patient was sent out of the country without medication or consultation with doctors although, according to Charisma Madarang and Lorena O'Neil of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child’s medical needs.

The government says the mothers opted to take their U.S. citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emmanuel Felton and Maegan Vazquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agents’ word for how events transpired.

ICE also deported Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the child in the U.S. with her father, who is a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sánchez was detained when she showed up at a scheduled check-in with ICE.

In March, ICE agents sent four U.S. citizens, including a 10-year-old with brain cancer, to Mexico when they deported their undocumented parents.

In May 2023, then–presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on “Day One” of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that would end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is “based on a historical myth, and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.” He promises to make “clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic US citizenship.”

Reelected in 2024, on his first day in office, Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It announced a new U.S. policy, saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing U.S. citizenship to persons whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or…when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”

The order specified that it would not take effect for 30 days. If it had been in effect when Trump’s rival for the White House, Vice President Kamala Harris, was born, she would have fallen under it.

But an executive order is simply a directive to federal employees. It cannot override the Constitution. Trump’s attack on the idea of birthright citizenship as a “historical myth” is a perversion of our history.

In the nineteenth century, the United States enshrined in its fundamental law the idea that there would not be different levels of rights in this country. Although not honored in practice, that idea, and its place in the law, gave those excluded from it the language and the tools to fight for equality. Over time, Americans have increasingly expanded those included in it.

The Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race. In that era, not only Black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and Indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860 platform that they were “opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired; and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”

After the Civil War, in 1866, as former Confederates denied their Black neighbors basic rights, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill establishing “[t]hat all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color…shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States.”

But President Andrew Johnson vetoed the 1866 Civil Rights Bill. He objected that the proposed law “comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks,” as citizens, and noted that if “all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such.” And if they weren’t already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law “to make our entire colored population and all other excepted classes citizens of the United States” when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress.

When Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson’s admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined; it simply acknowledged the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the short term, Americans recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States.” The Fourteenth Amendment established that Black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the U.S.-born children of immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where prejudice against Chinese immigrants ran hot. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But what about their children who were born in the United States?

Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873, the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889 he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S., leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him reentry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese.

Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government’s recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom, the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark decision, the court held by a vote of 6–2 that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States.

That decision has stood ever since, as a majority of Americans have recognized the principle behind the citizenship clause as the one central to the United States: “that all men are created equal” and that a nation based on that idea draws strength from all of its people.

On the last day of his presidency, in his last speech, President Ronald Reagan recalled what someone had once written to him: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”

He continued: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[bellybugzz]

just wanted to make my stance on here crystal clear . i am pro-choice, anti-deportation, i am pro-palestine, i support queer youth, the black lives matter movement and believe that children in schools lives are more valuable than the banning of an app that fosters lots of community and social interaction. i know my rights as a citizen of this country and i’m gonna exercise the fuck out of them.

if you think a convicted felon, and an accused sex offender has any right to be in office, especially after some of the events of yesterday’s inauguration speech, please feel free to block me! i don’t care that much <3. people i love are no longer safe and the only thing we can do is stay strong and fight the good fight.

birthright citizenship is being threatened, leaving people i care about vulnerable. basic healthcare is being denied, including life saving reproductive surgeries and medical transitions for queer/trans people. the 14th amendment of the constitution is under attack.

if you want to ask me questions i will more than happy answer them with sources to back up my claims! feel free to ask for resources for any knowledge you need and i will do the research for you (to the best of my abilities considering i am still a student).

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER AND YOU HAVE A SUPER COMPUTER IN YOUR HANDS RIGHT NOW!! GO LEARN SOMETHING!!

dont doomscroll too much these next few years and make sure to take care of yourself so we are ready to bounce back when we need it the most.

[tani-b-art]

The 14th Amendment was intended for the formerly enslaved and for the children of the formerly enslaved (Foundational) Black Americans

Deconstructing the 14th Amendment

The 13th Amendment, ratified in December 1865, made slavery illegal throughout the United States. But it did not address other fundamental questions about the status of newly freed African Americans. Were they citizens? Did they have the same rights as other Americans? To resolve these issues, Congress passed the 14th Amendment, which contained key provisions on the definition of citizenship, the protection of civil rights, and the power of the federal government.

Birthright Citizenship

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

— 14th Amendment, Section 1

From the nation’s founding, African Americans regarded themselves as citizens. When the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1788, it did not restrict citizenship based on race. However, it only counted enslaved people as 3/5ths of a person, rather than as full citizens, in state populations.

Dred Scott and Harriet Robinson Scott

Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet Robinson Scott, filed suits to claim their freedom while still enslaved, based on having lived in free territory. Dred Scott appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court, which denied his claim on the basis that he was not a citizen and had no right to sue in federal court. Delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney wrote: "[slaves and their descendants] had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order … they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

The U.S. Supreme Court declared in the case of Dred Scott v. Sanford that Black people, whether free or enslaved, were not citizens, but “a separate class of persons.” This decision protected the institution of slavery, which defined enslaved people as property, and supported discriminatory laws that denied equal citizenship status to free Black people.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment was specifically intended to repeal the Dred Scott decision. It established the principle of birthright citizenship, meaning a person born in the U.S. is automatically a citizen.

Under the 14th Amendment, African Americans could now legally claim the same constitutional rights afforded to all American citizens.

Civil Rights, Due Process, and Equal Protection

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

— 14th Amendment, Section 1

Protesting Black Codes

After the abolishment of slavery in 1865, southern states passed laws known as Black Codes, which restricted the civil rights of newly freed African Americans and forced them to work for their former enslavers. African Americans organized conventions across the South to protest the Black Codes and petition Congress for equal rights.

We simply desire that we shall be recognized as men; that we have no obstructions placed in our way; that the same laws which govern white men shall direct colored men; that we have the right of trial by a jury of our peers; that schools be opened or established for our children; that we be permitted to acquire homesteads for ourselves and children; that we be dealt with as others, in equity and justice.

Address of the Colored State Convention to the People of the State of South Carolina, 1865

The State Convention of Colored People of South Carolina, held in Charleston in November 1865, issued a 54-foot-long petition signed by hundreds of men. The petitioners asked Congress to help them secure “our equal rights before the law” and “an equal voice with all loyal citizens.”

The 14th Amendment revoked the Black Codes by declaring that states could not pass laws that denied citizens their constitutional rights and freedoms. No person could be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process (fair treatment by the judicial system)…

The 14th Amendment also included provisions relating to voting and representation in Congress. It amended the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution, stating that population counts would be based on the “whole number of persons” in a state—all people would be counted equally.

Reconstruction and the 14th Amendment

Congress passed the 14th Amendment on June 13, 1866, and sent it to the states to be ratified. But changing the Constitution to fulfill the promise of equality for African Americans would not be an easy process. Slavery, which defined Black people as property, not as citizens, had shaped the United States since its founding. In order for the 14th Amendment to become the new law of the land, it would need more than a ratification—it would need Reconstruction.

White Resistance

Twenty-two states ratified the 14th Amendment within a year after it was passed, out of a total of 28 needed to make the amendment part of the U.S. Constitution. But most southern states, led by the same white men who had passed the Black Codes, refused to ratify an amendment that defined African Americans as equal citizens. Black men and women who attempted to exercise their rights and freedoms faced resistance, violence, and retaliation from their fellow white citizens.

On May 1, 1866, mobs of white civilians and police attacked the Black community in Memphis, Tennessee. The first major outbreak of racial violence after the Civil War, the Memphis Massacre lasted three days and resulted in the deaths of 46 African Americans. National outrage over the incident helped fuel support for passage of the 14th Amendment.

Opposition to the 14th Amendment was not limited to the South. In northern and western states, the Democratic Party appealed to white voters who opposed the idea of equal rights for African Americans. Three states—Ohio, Oregon, and New Jersey—that initially ratified the 14th Amendment rescinded their ratifications in 1868 after Democrats gained control of those state legislatures.

Reconstruction Acts

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts, which placed former Confederate states under military rule until they ratified the 14th Amendment and established new constitutions guaranteeing equal rights and protections to African Americans. The Reconstruction Acts also granted Black men in southern states the right to vote and hold elected office. Once African Americans were able to participate in the political process, the 14th Amendment gained the final votes it needed in the South. On July 9, 1868, Louisiana and South Carolina voted to ratify the amendment, making it officially part of the U.S. Constitution.

Enforcement Acts

After the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868, white southerners continued to violently oppose Black civil rights. In 1870 and 1871, Congress passed three laws known as the Enforcement Acts, which invoked the power of the federal government under the 14th Amendment to intervene when states failed to protect the rights of citizens.

The Enforcement Acts specifically targeted the Ku Klux Klan for conspiring to prevent Black men from voting. During federal grand jury investigations, hundreds of African Americans came forward to testify about being terrorized by the Klan. In South Carolina, this testimony led to the indictment of 220 Klansmen for civil rights violations, but only five were ultimately tried and convicted.

“We, as Foundational Black Americans, are deeply rooted and constitutionally cemented in the fabric of this nation.”

“We’re the only group whose citizenship was guaranteed as a remedy for slavery.”

*the term African American or people of color is used in text from an article that I copy/pasted — I don’t use those terms

[gwydionmisha]

Why Everyone Hates the Supreme Court's Decision on Insurrection & the 14th Amendment

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 9, 2025

Heather Cox Richardson

Jul 10, 2025

On July 9, 1868, Americans changed the U.S. Constitution for the fourteenth time, adapting our foundational document to construct a new nation without systematic Black enslavement.

In 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution had prohibited slavery on the basis of race, but it did not prevent the establishment of a system in which Black Americans continued to be unequal. Backed by President Andrew Johnson, who had taken over the presidency after actor John Wilkes Booth murdered President Abraham Lincoln, white southern Democrats had done their best to push their Black neighbors back into subservience. So long as southern states had abolished enslavement, repudiated Confederate debts, and nullified the ordinances of secession, Johnson was happy to readmit them to full standing in the Union, still led by the very men who had organized the Confederacy and made war on the United States.

Northern Republican lawmakers refused. There was no way they were going to rebuild southern society on the same blueprint as existed before the Civil War, especially since the upcoming 1870 census would count Black Americans as whole persons for the first time in the nation’s history, giving southern states more power in Congress and the Electoral College after the war than they had had before it. Having just fought a war to destroy the South’s ideology, they were not going to let it regrow in peacetime.

Congress rejected Johnson’s plan for Reconstruction.

But then congressmen had to come up with their own. After months of hearings and debate, they proposed amending the Constitution to settle the outstanding questions of the war. Chief among these was how to protect the rights of Black Americans in states where they could neither vote nor testify in court or sit on a jury to protect their own interests.

Congress’s solution was the Fourteenth Amendment.

It took on the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision declaring that Black men "are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word 'citizens' in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens.”

The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The amendment also addressed the Dred Scott decision in another profound way. In 1857, southerners and Democrats who were adamantly opposed to federal power controlled the Supreme Court. They backed states’ rights. So the Dred Scott decision did more than read Black Americans out of our history: it dramatically circumscribed Congress’s power.

The Dred Scott decision declared that democracy was created at the state level, by those people in a state who were allowed to vote. In 1857 this meant white men, almost exclusively. If those people voted to do something widely unpopular—like adopting human enslavement, for example—they had the right to do so. People like Abraham Lincoln pointed out that such domination by states would eventually mean that an unpopular minority could take over the national government, forcing their ideas on everyone else, but defenders of states’ rights stood firm.

And so the Fourteenth Amendment gave the federal government the power to protect individuals even if their state legislatures had passed discriminatory laws. “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” it said. And then it went on to say that “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.”

The principles behind the Fourteenth Amendment were behind the 1870 creation of the Department of Justice, whose first job was to bring down the Ku Klux Klan terrorists in the South.

Those same principles took on profound national significance in the post–World War II era, when the Supreme Court began to use the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment aggressively to apply the protections in the Bill of Rights to the states. The civil rights decisions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, including the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools, come from this doctrine. Under it, the federal government took up the mantle of protecting the rights of individual Americans in the states from the whims of state legislatures.

Opponents of these new civil rights protections quickly began to object that such decisions were “legislating from the bench,” rather than permitting state legislatures to make their own laws. They began to call for “originalism,” the idea that the Constitution should be interpreted only as the Framers had intended when they wrote it, an argument that focused on the creation of law at the state level. Famously, in 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork, an originalist who had called for the rollback of the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, for a seat on that court.

Reacting to that nomination, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) recognized the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment to equality: “Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is—and is often the only—protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy….”

Kennedy’s comments foreshadowed the world advanced by today’s MAGA Republicans. In 2022 the Supreme Court, stacked as it is with right-wing justices, overturned the federal protection of abortion rights provided in the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and sent the question of abortion back to the states, many of which promptly banned the procedure.

When the court overturned the federal protection of abortion rights, Justice Clarence Thomas argued that federal protections for access to birth control and same-sex marriage should also be reexamined. In 2024, President Donald Trump suggested he would be open to letting states decide whether to restrict access to birth control, walking his statement back after a ferocious backlash.

Justice Samuel Alito has joined Thomas in attacking the Obergefell v. Hodges decision that provides federal protection for same-sex marriage, claiming that right, too, ought to be left up to voters in the states, even as Republican-dominated states are passing laws to limit who can vote.

Not only have today’s Republicans launched an attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement that the federal government protect Americans against discrimination in the states, President Donald Trump has launched an assault on the birthright citizenship that is the centerpiece of the amendment.

That section of the amendment— the first section— acknowledges that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens,” who enjoy the same rights, and that no state can take those rights away without due process of law.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Daily Don :: J.Duquette

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Musk says childless Americans shouldn't be allowed to vote. The Moms For Liberty say LGBTQ students should be segregated in separate classes. Alito and Thomas think gay people should be jailed. This isn't the lunatic fringe, it's the lunatic center

~Paul Rudnick

Novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter,