Gerald L. Neuman, Harvard Law School, has posted Lessons for Birthright Citizenship from Suspension of Deportation:
Although much has been written about why Donald Trump's Executive Order purporting to abolish birthright citizenship for children of unlawfully present or temporarily present parents violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, there is a prior issue that has received less discussion: the Executive Order also violates the Immigration and Nationality Act. This article examines that statutory issue through the lens of one particular but revealing aspect of the voluminous evidence, the law and practice of suspension of deportation for noncitizen parents of children born as citizens while their parents were unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States.
The dense interaction of Congress and the executive from 1940 into the 1950s on suspension of deportation shows repeated confirmation of the shared interpretation of both branches on the scope of birthright citizenship, as embodied in the 1940 Nationality Act and then the 1952 INA.
This article discusses both published sources and previously unpublished documentation obtained from INS files in the archives. Appendices to this article make available examples of previously unpublished suspension decisions, in order to further demonstrate that the Executive Order violates the INA. The actual practice totally contradicts revisionist theories that claim to support the Executive Order.
--Dan Ernst
