In October, President Trump promised to end birthright citizenship, the unwritten, unconstitutional practice of conferring citizenship on anyone born on American soil, with an executive order, and Senator Lindsey Graham said he would introduce legislation to do so.
They might want to hurry it up before the rest of the pregnant migrants in Tijuana get the same idea as one 19-year-old who was holed up in the border town until it was time for labor.
Last week, she dropped an anchor baby on U.S. soil less than 24 hours after illegaly climbing the border fence with her husband and three-year-old son. Birthright citizenship makes the baby a citizen.
She and her husband knew that. That’s why they jumped the fence.
Planned Illegal Entry
Maryury Elizabeth Serrano-Hernandez, 19, and her husband, Miguel Ortiz, 20, had a plan: Get to the United States and give birth there.
Thus did the couple and their small boy leave Honduras when she was seven months pregnant, hitching rides until they landed in the squalid squatters’ camp in Tijuana.
“At the makeshift camp, Serrano-Hernandez and her husband say they feared for their safety after being surrounded by Mexicans who weren’t happy they were there,” Fox News reported. That’s when they made a break for the land of milk and honey.
“After somehow climbing the border wall,” the network reported, “Serrano-Hernandez and her family were met by three border patrol agents who demanded they return to Tijuana. The family refused and asked for asylum. They were taken to the Imperial Beach Station in San Diego County for processing.”
After that, Serrano-Hernandez went into labor, and border agents took her to the hospital, where she gave birth on November 27.
The birth on U.S. soil, she said, is a “big reward” for the family, she told the anti-American Univision network. “With the faith in God, I always said my son will be born [in America].”
Of course, rather than sending the family back to Honduras, border agents “placed [them] into immigration proceedings and released [them] on their own recognizance on December 2,” the Border Patrol told Fox News.
“They are now being housed by a family and hope to move on to Columbus, Ohio,” Fox reported, “where they have family and will continue their asylum application process.”
But they didn’t cross the border for asylum, as the young mother herself admitted. They crossed to have a baby on U.S. soil, knowing the child would be a citizen, and that leftist politicians and judges would stop anyone from sending them home.
Trump and Birthright Citizenship
The chance that these illegal aliens will be sent home is zero.
But that doesn’t mean Trump can’t keep the promise he made in October during an interview with Axios. Trump’s advisors told him he could end the practice with an executive order.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump told Axios. “You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”
Trump rightly said that birthright citizenship is “ridiculous” and “has to end.”
“It’ll happen,” Trump said, “with an executive order.”
Such an action would undoubtedly invite a farrago of lawsuits similar the one that persuaded a federal judge to block the president’s ban on asylum claims from “migrants” who cross the border between legal ports of entry.
Right after Trump proposed the executive order on birthright citizenship, Graham said he would fight against birthright citizenship in the Senate. “Finally, a president willing to take on this absurd policy of birthright citizenship,” Graham said. “I’ve always supported comprehensive immigration reform — and at the same time — the elimination of birthright citizenship.”
Graham, who suggested a constitutional amendment in 2010, observed that the United States “is one of two developed countries in the world who grant citizenship based on location of birth,” and that the “policy is a magnet for illegal immigration, out of the mainstream of the developed world, and needs to come to an end.”
Americans wait for Trump and Graham to act.
