Letters from an American - April 26, 2025

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

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April 26, 2025. Early yesterday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, sent three U.S. citizens, aged two, four, and seven, from Louisiana, including one with stage four 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 Matarang and Lorena O'Neill of Rolling Stone, ICE agents were told of the child's medical needs. The government says the mothers opted to take their US citizen children to Honduras with them. But as Emanuel Felton and Megan Vasquez of the Washington Post noted, because ICE refused to let the women talk to their lawyers, there is only the agent's word for how events transpired.

ICE also deported Heidi Sanchez, a Cuban-born mother of a one-year-old who is still breastfeeding, leaving the U.S.-born child in the U.S. with her father, who was a U.S. citizen. Like the women flown to Honduras, Sanchez 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 promised 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 U.S. citizenship. Re-elected 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 new US policy saying that the government would not issue documents recognizing US 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, is a perversion of our history. In the 19th 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 that 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 rights 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 gypsies, 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 accepted classes citizens of the United States when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress. When Congress wrote the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson's admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined, it simply acknowledged

that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the 14th Amendment reads, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens 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 14th Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott versus Sanford 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 14th Amendment established that black men were citizens.

But the question of whether the amendment really did recognize the citizenship of the US-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 US, leaving his wife behind, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him re-entry to the

U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese. Wang 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 US v. Wong Kim Arc decision, the court held by a vote of six to two 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 was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was

produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.