Section 1 of the 14th Amendment says that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Trump's defenders argue that children born of illegal immigrants in the United States have never entered into a social compact that makes them citizens of the United States protected by U.S. law.
Samarth Desai, a second year law student at Yale Law School, has a devastating response to this claim, which was recently argued for by Georgetown Law Professor Randy Barnett and University of Minnesota Law Professor Ilan Wurman in an op-ed in the New York Times. Desai's article, with which I totally agree, appears below.
Birthright Citizenship: A Test Case
