California Rep. Maxine Waters (D) suggested Saturday during an anti-Trump administration rally in Los Angeles that first lady Melania Trump is in the country illegally.
It appears that the 86-year-old Democrat’s failed attempt at a mic-drop moment was the product not only of decrepitude and hypocrisy but of a gross misapprehension of key facts.
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump
signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens. Trump noted in the order that “the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States” if those individuals’ parents were illegally in the country or not lawful permanent residents at the time of their birth.
Multiple federal judges
blocked the order, and multiple appeals courts have refused to overturn those injunctions. The matter will soon be settled by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In the meantime, leftists, both foreign and domestic, have complained about the distinct possibility that illegal aliens’ anchor babies won’t always be conferred citizenship.
During a protest over the weekend, Waters broached the issue,
reportedly stating, “When [Trump] talks about birthright, and he’s going to undo the fact that the Constitution allows those who are born here, even if the parents are undocumented, they have a right to stay in America.”
“If he wants to start looking so closely to find those who were born here and their parents were undocumented, maybe he ought to first look at Melania,” added Waters. “We don’t know whether or not her parents were documented. And maybe we better just take a look.”
‘The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the US are citizens.’
Contrary to Waters’ insinuation, Melania Trump was not born in the United States, and neither Mrs. Trump nor her parents entered the country illegally.
Melania Trump, born in the former Yugoslavia,
informed the Associated Press via an attorney in 2016 that she legally came to the United States from Slovenia on Aug. 27, 1996, on a B1/B2 visitor visa. Mrs. Trump subsequently obtained an H-1B work visa then an EB-1 “Einstein Visa.”
The future first lady, who appeared on the cover of British GQ in 2000, received a green card in March 2001 and became an American citizen in 2006.
Viktor and Amalija Knavs, the first lady’s parents,
similarly took the legal path to American citizenship. After living on green cards sponsored by Mrs. Trump, the first lady’s Slovenian parents became citizens in 2018.
Waters asserted as a fact that the Constitution grants illegal aliens’ children a right to remain in America. The nation’s top court will decide if the congresswoman is wrong on this matter, as well.
Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Department of Justice lawyer, previously
noted that the claim anyone born in the U.S. has citizenship automatically, even if their parents are here illegally, “ignores the text and legislative history of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to extend citizenship to freed slaves and their children.”
“The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens,” continued von Spakovsky. “It says that ‘[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ are citizens. That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of ‘birthright’ citizenship.”
“Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has ‘subjected’ himself ‘to the jurisdiction’ of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike,” added the legal fellow. “But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.”
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