Trump v. Barbara

The court got it right.

I am sorry; I was very productive and then quiet. However, after watching the Supreme Court and seeing how the majority eschewed politics entirely and ruled on the plain text of the Constitution and the law, I was certain I knew how this case was going to go. While I very much support the ending of birthright citizenship ( if neither of your parents is a citizen), without some mental gymnastics, it is hard to read the text to interpret it any way other than that if you are born here, you are a citizen. The text in question:

”Section 1. 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.”

I know this was written to ensure citizenship for freed slaves, but the text isn’t written with that exclusion. It says anyone born here is a citizen. I will go on to say this is a poorly written rush job because the possibly unintended consequences of the wording to ensure freed slaves were citizens are very visible today. The second part of Section 1 is worse. Prior to the 14th Amendment, the federal Constitution was a restraint on the federal government, and States were restrained and governed under their own constitutions. This expansion of federal power essentially stripped the last vestiges of independence from states. Was it needed to ensure the freed slaves were treated fairly? Maybe, but with the following 100 years of Jim Crow and worse, it didn’t seem to work very well. It has, however, given the feds the right to intrude on many areas that were once the sole domain of the states. Gun laws, School Prayer, State Funding, Education, and the list goes on. While more subtle and background, it has been far more damaging.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. This court doesn’t interpret as much as it reads things as written, attempting to follow the changes in language (Regulated in the 1780s meant supplied, not controlled), and then rules on what they understand the documents to actually say (from some of their rulings, you can tell they don’t like it, but that is the job). In my opinion, this is probably the best court we have had in 100 years, even when they do things I don’t like (upholding birthright citizenship) because I am morally consistent and would prefer a court that is the same. Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t all the justices, but enough of them. For the majority, it isn’t about party or who put them there, but what the law actually says. Bottom line: birthright citizenship stands, and that is fine. We have all the tools we need to end anchor babies already on the books, and if we are being honest, all it would take would be to treat illegals like we treat our own citizens who commit a crime.

To that effect, over the last couple of weeks, I have been working with a lawyer I know to write a white paper on how we should deal with the anchor baby problem. I have it to hundreds of people via email and traditional paper mail (postage is stupid); among the recipients are congressional offices, the heads of immigration enforcement agencies, all the state governors, and many others. I am still working on sending them out as finances permit (postage is hundreds of dollars in just stamps, $0.82 cents each). It also takes time because most people in Congress do not publish a public email address, and you have to send it through a web form. The rest of this post is the contents of my white paper on ending anchor babies almost instantly inside our current legal framework, as well as a link to download the .pdf so you too can send them out if you so choose.

The White Paper:

POLICY PROPOSAL

Citizen Children of Deported Illegal Aliens:

A Constitutionally Grounded Framework for

Child Welfare and Immigration Enforcement

Prepared for Policy Consideration 2026

Executive Summary

This proposal addresses one of the most legally and politically contentious issues in American immigration enforcement: the status of United States citizen children born to illegal alien parents who are subject to deportation. The current system does not present a binary of deportation versus foster care. It presents a binary of deportation versus de facto amnesty, and the amnesty option has become the default.

Under current practice, the existence of a citizen child functions as a trump card that effectively nullifies deportation orders in a large percentage of cases. Through a combination of political pressure, NGO-funded litigation, and enforcement hesitation, illegal alien families with citizen children are routinely permitted to remain in the United States indefinitely. The citizen child does not merely complicate enforcement. In practice, the citizen child eliminates it. This is the anchor baby strategy, and it works precisely because no satisfactory policy framework exists to resolve the resulting impasse.

This proposal resolves that impasse by applying existing family law doctrine uniformly. When American citizens, regardless of the basis of their unavailability, are permanently unable to care for their citizen children, the state acts in the best interests of those children through established child welfare processes: temporary placement or termination of parental rights where permanent unavailability is established, and adoption into permanent American families. Deportation with no realistic path to legal return is functionally and legally equivalent to any other lengthy custodial sentence for these purposes.

This proposal requires no constitutional amendment, no redefinition of birthright citizenship, and no new legal framework. It requires only the consistent application of existing family law doctrine to a new factual circumstance. It eliminates the anchor baby incentive structure entirely, ends the de facto amnesty that citizen children currently provide to illegal alien parents, reduces illegal immigration-related benefit expenditures, and produces better outcomes for citizen children than the current system. It applies prospectively, with a grandfather policy for existing citizen children of illegal alien parents.

I. The Problem: Current Practice Converts Citizen Children Into De Facto Amnesty

The anchor baby phenomenon is not accidental. It is a deliberate legal and practical strategy, explicitly counseled by immigration attorneys, advocacy NGOs, and human smuggling networks. The strategy rests on a single calculation: producing a United States citizen child creates barriers to the parents’ deportation that, in practice, make enforcement prohibitively difficult. That calculation has proven correct under current policy, and the result is a system in which illegal alien parents of citizen children enjoy a practical exemption from immigration enforcement that their counterparts without citizen children do not.

A. How the Current System Functions in Practice

When enforcement is attempted against illegal alien parents of citizen children, the following sequence occurs under current practice:

• Enforcement action initiates. ICE moves to detain and deport illegal alien parents.

• The citizen child is deployed as a legal and political weapon. NGO-funded attorneys file emergency motions, asylum claims, and injunction requests citing the citizen child’s presence as a basis for halting removal.

• Political pressure follows. Elected officials, media, and advocacy organizations frame enforcement as “separating families” and “deporting citizens.” The citizen child becomes the face of opposition to enforcement.

• Enforcement hesitates or collapses. In a significant percentage of cases, the combination of legal pressure, political pressure, and the absence of a satisfactory policy framework results in enforcement being delayed, limited, or abandoned entirely.

• The family remains. The illegal alien parents stay in the United States indefinitely. The citizen child functions as a de facto amnesty, providing the parents with the long-term residence, employment access, and benefit eligibility that they entered illegally to obtain.

This is not a hypothetical worst-case scenario. It is the documented operational reality of immigration enforcement when citizen children are present. The anchor baby strategy works because the system has no answer to a clear question: if we deport the parents, what happens to the citizen child? In the absence of a clear answer, the system defaults to non-enforcement.

B. The False Binary Presented by the Opposition

Enforcement opponents have successfully framed the issue as a binary choice between two options, both of which are presented as unacceptable:

• Option A: Deport the citizen child with the parents, violating the child’s citizenship rights.

• Option B: Keep the entire family in the United States, treating the citizen child’s presence as a barrier to the parents’ deportation.

This framing is deliberately constructed to make Option B de facto amnesty for the parents appear to be the only humane and legally defensible choice. It succeeds because no policy framework has existed to offer a third option. It is not a choice between deporting citizens and keeping illegal aliens. It is a choice between treating citizen children as political tools and treating them as citizens with the same rights and protections as every other American child.

C. The Cost of the Current System

The practical amnesty conferred by anchor children carries substantial costs that receive insufficient attention in public debate:

• Fiscal cost: Illegal alien parents of citizen children access federal and state benefits both through the citizen child’s eligibility and through programs treating the citizen child’s household as eligible. More significantly, the practical barrier to deportation results in long-term residence, employment, and benefit access by the illegal alien parents themselves, a cost substantially larger than the child’s individual benefit eligibility.

• Enforcement credibility: A system that produces through consistent practice the message that a citizen child provides effective immunity from deportation has no credible deterrent against illegal immigration. Every successful anchor baby outcome is a broadcast advertisement: have a child here and you can stay.

• Child welfare cost: The current system does not serve the citizen child well. The child is raised as a legal and political instrument of the parents’ immigration strategy, in a household of uncertain legal status, under the constant shadow of potential enforcement action. The child’s citizenship is treated as a tool rather than honored as a person with attendant rights and protections.

II. The Proposed Framework: A Third Option

This proposal applies the existing American child welfare framework, which already governs citizen children of citizen parents who are incarcerated, permanently incapacitated, or otherwise permanently unable to provide care. This creates an analogous situation of citizen children of deported illegal alien parents. It is not a punitive measure directed at the child. It is the extension of existing child welfare protections to a population of citizen children currently denied those protections.

A. Core Principle: Equal Treatment of Citizen Children

A United States citizen child has the same rights and deserves the same protections regardless of the immigration status of their parents. A child's citizenship does not change based on the circumstances of their birth or the legal status of their parents. The child welfare framework applicable to that child should not change either. Current practice provides illegal alien parents with procedural accommodations and de facto enforcement exemptions that have no equivalent in the citizen parent context. This proposal corrects that inequity by applying the same child welfare framework uniformly to all citizen children whose parents are permanently unable to care for them in the United States.

B. The Procedural Timeline

The existing child welfare framework, already applied to citizen parents, proceeds through the following steps when a parent faces custodial separation from a citizen child:

• Arrest and initial placement: Upon the parent’s arrest and detention, the child is placed in temporary foster care, typically within 24 hours. A due process hearing is held within 24-72 hours to establish temporary placement.

• Temporary custody: During the period of legal proceedings, the child remains in temporary placement. For deported illegal alien parents, this period is determined by the deportation proceeding, which moves significantly faster than a criminal trial because deportation is a civil proceeding that does not require proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

• Determination of permanent unavailability: Upon final deportation order and removal, the deported parent is permanently unavailable to the child in the same functional sense as a citizen parent sentenced to a lengthy custodial term with no realistic prospect of return. This determination triggers the existing framework for evaluating termination of parental rights.

• Termination of parental rights hearing: Following a determination of permanent unavailability, the court schedules a termination hearing. Under existing law in all fifty states, permanent unavailability is established grounds for termination. The factual predicate for deportation with no realistic path to legal return is clear, and not subject to meaningful dispute.

• Adoption: Following termination, the child is placed for adoption. The adoption demand for healthy infants and young children in the United States substantially exceeds supply, with waiting lists of pre-qualified families measured in years in most states. Trial adoption periods may be waived where the child has been in foster care with prospective adoptive parents during the proceedings, consistent with existing practice in citizen parent cases.

C. The Due Process Window

Due process requirements for termination of parental rights are well established. This proposal does not seek to circumvent due process. The due process timeline in the deportation context would be naturally accelerated compared to the criminal context for the following reasons:

• Speed of proceedings: Deportation proceedings are civil, not criminal, and do not require proof beyond a reasonable doubt. The primary bottleneck in the citizen parent context waiting for a criminal trial to reach verdict before termination can be initiated does not exist in the deportation context.

• Clarity of the factual predicate: A final deportation order, once final, is the determination of permanent unavailability. This is legally straightforward and not subject to meaningful challenge due to the fact that a citizen sentenced to a long prison sentence falls under the same category of unavailability.

• Remote participation: The deported parent’s due process rights are constitutionally satisfied by notice and the opportunity to participate remotely. Courts already routinely accommodate remote participation in family law proceedings.

• The child’s developmental interest: The child’s demonstrated need for permanence creates a compelling interest in timely resolution of custody status, a principle courts have consistently affirmed in applying the best interests standard.

The practical result is that the full due process framework is honored while the natural pace of deportation proceedings, faster than criminal proceedings, means the timeline compresses rather than extends compared to the citizen parent context. No artificial acceleration is required. In a citizen parent case involving a serious criminal conviction, the sequence from arrest to conviction to termination, to completed adoption, can take several years. The deportation equivalent moves through the same framework on a comparable or faster timeline of a year or less due to the less stringent requirements for deportation. The parental unavailability is the same in the end.

D. Grandfather Policy

This proposal applies prospectively. Existing citizen children of illegal alien parents currently in the United States are grandfathered under current practice. Retroactive application to millions of existing cases would overwhelm state family court systems and would produce large-scale disruption without proportionate policy benefit. The anchor baby strategy is a forward-looking calculation. Eliminating the incentive going forward eliminates the strategy without requiring the disruption or retroactive application. For the grandfathered population, current practice continues. The new framework applies to citizen children born after the effective date of this policy.

E. Sibling Groups: Citizen and Non-Citizen Children

Where a deported family includes both citizen children and non-citizen children, the following rules apply:

• Non-citizen children accompany their deported parents. They have no independent right to remain in the United States, and their appropriate placement is with their parents.

• Citizen children in the sibling group are subject to this framework. They have an independent right to remain and are entitled to the child welfare protections this proposal provides.

• Mixed sibling groups where the citizen child is old enough to have established relationships with older non-citizen siblings will be subject to judicial best-interests analysis on a case-by-case basis. Where the court finds the citizen child’s interests are best served by accompanying the family, that determination governs. This is a judicial determination, not an administrative default.

The framework does not mandate separation. It ensures that when separation occurs, the citizen child receives the same permanent placement protections afforded to other citizen children rather than indefinite limbo or de facto exile with deported parents.

III. Legal Precedent and Constitutional Foundation

This proposal rests on established legal doctrine at every stage. No new constitutional authority is required. No existing precedent is challenged. No amendment is needed.

A. Parens Patriae

The doctrine of parens patriae, the state as guardian of those who cannot protect themselves, is among the oldest and most firmly established principles in American jurisprudence. The Supreme Court recognized this authority in Prince v. Massachusetts, 321 U.S. 158 (1944), holding that the state has a compelling interest in the welfare of children that may override parental authority in appropriate circumstances. This doctrine provides the constitutional foundation for the entire child welfare framework on which this proposal rests. It applies to all citizen children equally, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.

B. Termination of Parental Rights: Established Doctrine

The Supreme Court has addressed the constitutional parameters of parental rights termination in a series of controlling decisions:

• Santosky v. Kramer, 455 U.S. 745 (1982): Established that termination of parental rights requires clear and convincing evidence. The factual predicate of a final deportation order with no realistic path to legal return satisfies this standard.

• Troxel v. Granville, 530 U.S. 57 (2000): Affirmed the fundamental liberty interest of parents in the care of their children while confirming that this interest is not absolute and may be overridden by the state acting in the child’s best interests.

• Lassiter v. Department of Social Services, 452 U.S. 18 (1981): Established due process requirements for termination proceedings, including notice and an opportunity to be heard. Remote participation accommodates the deported parent’s right to be heard.

Every state has statutory grounds for termination based on abandonment, permanent incapacity, or permanent unavailability. Deportation with no realistic path to legal return fits within existing statutory language in all fifty states without requiring new legislation in most jurisdictions.

C. The Best Interests of the Child Standard

The best interests of the child standard is the governing framework in American family law for all custody, placement, and termination decisions. Its application to all citizen children. This is best for children of deported parents on three grounds:

• Permanence: A child’s need for permanence and stability is a paramount consideration. De facto amnesty that leaves the family in legal limbo indefinitely does not serve the child’s best interests. Adoption into a permanent American family does.

• Availability: The adoption demand for healthy infants and toddlers substantially exceeds supply in the United States. Placement in a permanent adoptive family is available, rapid, and directly serves the child’s interest in permanence.

• Citizenship: The child’s citizenship rights are fully preserved and enhanced, not diminished, by this framework. The child remains in America, in an American family, with full access to American rights and opportunities.

D. The 14th Amendment Is Untouched

This proposal does not challenge, modify, reinterpret, or in any way affect the birthright citizenship provisions of the 14th Amendment. Every citizen child born in the United States to illegal alien parents remains a full United States citizen with all attendant rights, including the right to remain in the United States, hold a United States passport, receive United States consular protection, access all rights and benefits of citizenship, and return to the United States at any time, including upon reaching majority.

What changes is the parental relationship, not the citizenship status, using the existing family law framework and requires no engagement with the 14th Amendment whatsoever.

IV. The Inequity in Current Practice: Greater Protections for Illegal Aliens Than for Citizens

Current practice provides illegal alien parents of citizen children with de facto protections and practical accommodations that are not afforded to citizen parents in analogous circumstances. This inequity is not legally required, is not constitutionally sound, and reflects the accumulated success of advocacy-driven policy rather than principled legal analysis.

A. The Citizen Parent: How the System Currently Works

When a United States citizen parent is arrested and removed from their child’s daily life through criminal proceedings, the following sequence occurs without exception:

• Initial placement: Children are placed in temporary foster care within 24 hours of the parent’s detention, regardless of the parent’s wishes and regardless of any political or social pressure.

• Due process hearing: A hearing occurs within 24-72 hours establishing temporary placement. The citizen parent’s citizenship provides no barrier to this process.

• Case proceeds: Children remain in foster care throughout the criminal proceedings. The system does not ask whether enforcement of the law against the parent is “kind” to the child or whether the child’s presence should limit prosecution.

• Termination motion: Upon conviction and sentencing, if the sentence creates a period of unavailability inconsistent with the child’s developmental needs, the state moves to terminate parental rights. The parent’s citizenship, community ties, and expressed desire to maintain the parental relationship are all considered and all ultimately subordinated to the child’s best interests.

• Adoption: Termination is completed and adoption proceeds, often within 30-180 days of the termination order, with trial periods waived for children with established foster placement relationships over 6 months long.

No advocacy organization mounts a national campaign arguing that the citizen parent’s criminal conviction should not result in family separation. No injunctions are filed arguing that the child’s presence creates a barrier to prosecution. The law is enforced, and the child welfare system functions as designed.

B. The Illegal Alien Parent: How the System Currently Works

When an illegal alien parent is detained and subject to deportation, the sequence under current practice diverges sharply:

• Legal weaponization: The citizen child is immediately deployed as a legal and political weapon by NGO-funded attorneys. Emergency motions, injunctions, and asylum claims cite the citizen child’s presence as a basis for halting removal.

• Political pressure: Media coverage frames enforcement as “separating families” and “deporting citizens.” The citizen child’s photograph becomes the face of national opposition to enforcement.

• Enforcement collapses: In a significant percentage of cases, the absence of a satisfactory policy framework combined with legal and political pressure results in enforcement being delayed or abandoned. The illegal alien parents remain in the United States indefinitely.

• Exile or limbo: If enforcement does occur, the citizen child accompanies the parents to a foreign country, effectively exiling an American citizen, or remains in legal limbo with uncertain guardianship arrangements while the system awaits a parental return that will not legally occur.

The result: illegal alien parents of citizen children enjoy a practical exemption from immigration enforcement that citizen parents facing criminal prosecution are never offered. The illegal alien parent’s preference is treated as a constraint on enforcement. The citizen parent’s preference is subordinated to the law and to the child’s best interests. This disparity is not right or indicative of equal protection. This proposal ends it.

V. Policy Effects

A. Elimination of the Anchor Baby Incentive

The anchor baby strategy functions because the calculation is favorable: produce a citizen child, and the practical likelihood of deportation drops substantially. The network of immigration attorneys, advocacy NGOs, and human smuggling organizations that counsels illegal aliens on this strategy is sophisticated, well-funded, and responsive to legal and policy changes.

This proposal eliminates the favorable calculation entirely and inverts it. If producing a citizen child results in the child remaining in America in a permanent American family while the parents are deported rather than creating a barrier to deportation, the strategy produces the opposite of its intended effect. The deterrent will be immediate and will not require the actual processing of large numbers of cases. Within weeks of passage, counsel advising anchor birth strategies will cease doing so. Within 3-6 months, the practice will have largely stopped. The proposal is self-terminating: it works so quickly that the political opposition loses its supply of new sympathetic cases before a sustained campaign can be mounted.

B. Restoration of Enforcement Credibility

The most significant policy effect of this proposal is the restoration of the credibility of immigration enforcement against the large population of illegal aliens whose current practical immunity rests entirely on the presence of citizen children. Once the citizen child no longer functions as a deportation shield, enforcement against this population becomes straightforward, and the de facto amnesty that anchor births have conferred is eliminated proactively. Each enforcement action that proceeds without the anchor child barrier creates additional deterrent effect and reinforces the restored credibility of the enforcement system as a whole.

C. Fiscal Impact

The fiscal impact operates at two levels. Directly, illegal alien parents of citizen children currently access federal and state benefits through the citizen child’s eligibility and through programs treating the citizen child’s household as eligible. These direct benefit expenditures decrease as the anchor baby population decreases. More significantly, the practical amnesty conferred by anchor children has resulted in large illegal alien populations maintaining long-term household presence in the United States, accessing employment, public services, healthcare, education, and benefits through both legal and illegal channels. The removal of the practical barrier to enforcement has fiscal implications substantially larger than the direct benefit expenditures attributable to citizen children alone.

D. Child Welfare Outcomes

Adoption into permanent American families produces measurably better developmental outcomes for children than extended foster care or legal limbo. The child welfare and developmental psychology literature is consistent on this point across decades of research. The current practice of treating citizen children as instruments of their parents’ immigration strategy raised in households of uncertain legal status, with their citizenship deployed as a political tool rather than honored as a protected status, does not serve these children well. This proposal treats them as what they are: American citizens entitled to American protections, permanent families, and stable futures.

VI. Anticipated Opposition and Response

A. The Nature of the Opposition

Opposition to this proposal will be immediate, loud, and sustained. It will operate primarily through emotional narrative and imagery rather than legal argument, because the legal argument against this proposal is weak. Opponents cannot win on the legal merits. They will fight on the narrative. The specific framings that will be deployed are predictable:

• Family separation: The proposal will be framed as government-mandated family destruction, deliberately evoking the 2018 family separation crisis. The structural difference that this proposal protects citizen children’s right to remain in America with permanent families rather than detaining them in processing facilities will be suppressed in this framing.

• Forced adoption: The proposal will be characterized as the state placing minority children with white families, regardless of the actual demographics of the adoption process or the legal framework governing adoptive placement.

• Punishing children: This framing inverts the actual effect. The current system punishes citizen children by treating their citizenship as a political tool and denying them the child welfare protections afforded to every other American child. This proposal extends those protections to them.

• Unconstitutional: This claim will be made repeatedly despite being without foundation. The proposal does not touch the 14th Amendment, applies existing family law doctrine that has been constitutionally tested, and is fully constitutional

None of these arguments engage with the legal substance of the proposal. The sustained response is simple and consistent: this proposal treats citizen children as citizens, with the same protections afforded to every other citizen child in America.

B. State-Level Resistance

A minority of states, primarily those with large illegal alien populations, established sanctuary policy infrastructure, and Democratic governance, will take measures to resist this policy. Expected resistance measures include state legislation directing family courts not to treat deportation as grounds for termination proceedings, attorney general guidance limiting cooperation with federal authorities in family court contexts, and NGO-funded legal challenges to specific proceedings.

This resistance is predictable, and ultimately insufficient to defeat the policy’s core purpose for three reasons:

• Deterrent effect: The deterrent does not require universal implementation. Even partial implementation changes the anchor baby calculation. No rational actor relies on a strategy that fails a significant fraction of the time when the consequence of failure is permanent loss of a child. State-level resistance that creates uncertainty is itself partially deterrent.

• Federal authority: Federal authority over immigration enforcement is well established and repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court in the current term. The federal interest in consistent enforcement provides a basis for federal engagement with state resistance that does not exist in purely domestic family law disputes.

• Litigation outcome: The litigation dynamic that state resistance creates follows the familiar pattern: politically motivated