Washington, D.C. (February 26, 2025)— Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, led subcommittee Democrats in denouncing Donald Trump’s illegal assault on birthright citizenship.
The hearing included testimony from Amanda Frost, Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law; Chuck Cooper, Chairman and Founding Partner, Cooper & Kirk; Trent McCotter, Partner, Boyden Gray PLLC, and Director of Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law Separation of Powers Clinic; and Matt O’Brien, Director of Investigations, Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI).
Subcommittee Democrats emphasized that Donald Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional Executive Order cannot revoke the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, a right that reflects the foundational American value that we do not define our nationhood by bloodlines or parentage, but by our shared democratic values.
Ranking Member Scanlon said: “Instead of citizens, the U.S. would develop a permanent underclass of stateless, not-legally-recognized subjects, who could be exploited or deported at the mercy of a political majority. That would be a twisted reflection of the intended purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment. Because the language chosen by the Amendment’s framers in the aftermath of the Civil War was to prevent this kind of caste system from ever returning.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal asked Professor Frost: “Birthright citizenship has generated this deep sense of membership in our society, a collective commitment to a shared value and opportunity, equality, and contribution that’s allowed America to thrive. What’s the impact on real life Americans across this country?” Professor Frost explained, “to eliminate birthright citizenship would be to create a permanent underclass, a caste system which was the very result of the Reconstruction Congress intended to end.”
Ranking Member Raskin said: “The original purposes of the 14th Amendment remains perfectly clear for anyone who’s an originalist. They wanted to stop the government from reconstituting a racial or ethnic caste system based on the inheritance of a subordinate or a superior legal status from one’s parents. In post-reconstruction America, nobody would ever become a slave or a serf or a legal outcast or a prince or a princess, or a king, or a count at birth because everybody here would attain equal citizenship at birth.”
Subcommittee Democrats explained how over the 150 years since the American people enshrined birthright citizenship into the Constitution, the United States became great and continues to be so today because of the innumerable contributions of Americans born here to immigrant parents, regardless of where their parents came from or their parents’ citizenship status.
Rep. Becca Balint said: “What Republicans are offering is a plan to redefine who gets to be American. And it’s a big step towards a country where Americanness itself applies to only a privileged few, in a country where future and past generations are relegated to an underclass status. They’re trying to stake out who is a real American and it will leave a whole lot of people out. And this is a frightening road to go down. The arguments we’ve heard have been with us since our founding.”
Rep. Pramila Jayapal said: “Like many of the attacks on immigrants by the Trump Administration, this attack centers on old tropes that question the ‘allegiance’ of immigrants, tropes that were applied to enslaved black people brought to this country in shackles as well as Japanese Americans imprisoned and interned during World War II. These attacks are couched in a completely baseless argument that somehow immigrants born in the United States to a parent who is undocumented, don’t have sole allegiance to the United States.”
Ranking Member Scanlon said: “You know, the effort to end birthright citizenship is hardly something new. It’s been the long-term goal of anti-Semitic and white nationalist groups for decades. The claims largely based on the bigoted great replacement conspiracy theory, the same conspiracy theory that has inspired a lot of deadly terrorist attacks in recent years. And we’re hearing really uncomfortable echoes of some of that here in Congress.”
Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove said: “The origin story of the amendment is as applicable now as it was then. You had a Democratic president impeached in 1868 and a Republican president impeached in 1921. You had political violence in 1968 with the Louisiana massacre and an insurrection that happened here in 2021 where Capitol Police were speared with American flags. You had a tsunami in Hawaii in 1868, and a fire again in 2023. You had an economic turndown in 1968 and you have $15 eggs under Trump right now in 2025. Same environment, toxic, hostile, destructive, deadly. And let’s be clear, they had immigrants back then too, Irish, Jews, Germans, Italians, people who couldn't speak English, but they saw through the moment and passed the 14th Amendment. And it's not like this country has not had moments where people have felt under attack. We’ve had Jim Crow, World War II with the Germans, McCarthyism, the Japanese internment camps. The Vietnam War and birthright citizenship has survived all of that. And now, not because of war, but because somebody can’t get a job at Walmart because of xenophobia, fragile ego, and mediocrity. We are going to look for culprits instead of protecting the Constitution. It is the epitome of lazy, and if they could put the 14th Amendment in the Constitution during those hostile times, we can keep it in law during ours. The climate is not different. It is the patriotism of the Republican Party, that is different.”
Subcommittee Democrats made clear that Republicans have repeatedly failed to convince the public to end birthright citizenship through legal means, so now they have stooped to cheering from the sidelines as President Trump tries to change the Constitution without the American people’s consent.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin said: “There’s been a major flurry of litigation about the onslaught of unlawful and unconstitutional executive orders that have come down from the Trump Administration, and this specific executive order has appeared in four different courts. As I understand it, all four of them have worked to stop it either through a temporary restraining order or a preliminary injunction. The Judges overseeing the cases in these four cases were appointed by my count, by Presidents Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden— two Republicans and two Democrats. The fact that the government cloaked what is in fact a constitutional amendment under the guise of an executive order is equally unconstitutional. The Constitution is not something the government can play policy games with.”
Rep. Becca Balint asked Professor Frost: “What if the Supreme Court decides that the 14th Amendment actually does not give citizenship to children born in this country to non-citizens? What if the Supreme Court made that ruling? Where does that leave the descendants of those who’ve been granted birthright citizenship?” Professor Frost responded: “It would unwind the citizenship of the entire country. We are a nation of immigrants, very significant majority of us trace that really, other than Native Americans, trace back our lineage to an immigrant parent, grandparent, 5% of our military are the children of immigrants… Imagine a generation from now, it wouldn’t be good enough to show your own birth certificate. You’d have to show the lineage. This is exactly what the Reconstruction Congress wanted to prevent, and it’s exactly the result that Dred Scott wanted.”
Rep. Dan Goldman said: “It baffles me that the Republican Party, the party of small government, the party of federalism and states’ rights would sit here and say, ‘yes, it is the government's job to create a definition of ‘allegiance,’ which somehow is required in order for birthright citizenship… Pass a constitutional amendment. Because this definition that [Republicans] are providing is unbelievably vague and very careless, and I look forward to the courts rejecting it.”
