Both Sides Get Ready for Legal Brawl over Denying Citizenship to Babies of Undocumented

By Elizabeth Llorente
Published January 11, 2011

AMENDMENT 14 Section 1 says: 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. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

As lawmakers in several states push for an end to automatic citizenship to U.S.-born babies of illegal immigrants, a Hispanic organization that has won landmark civil rights cases says it will sue any state that passes such a law.

LatinoJustice PRLDEF says that plans by legislators of several states to push for a law that would stop the tradition of birthright citizenship for those babies goes against the 14th Amendment.

Those pushing for a law to end automatic U.S. citizenship to those babies say they are not intimated by the threat of a lawsuit – in fact, they say, they want a court battle. They say a court fight will offer them the best chance to show that the 14th amendment was not meant to be applied to babies of people who are in the United States illegally.

“The very purpose of the 14th amendment was to insure that we would not have a caste system in which the children born in our country would have no chance of ever becoming citizens equal to all others,â€