February 17, 2025
The Honorable Mark Warner
The Honorable Tim Kaine
The Honorable Eugene Vindman
Dear Senators Warner and Kaine and Representative Vindman,
The 14th Amendment is clear: No politician can decide who among those born in our country is ‘worthy’ of citizenship.
Yet Donald Trump’s new executive order seeks to deny citizenship to countless children born in the United States – going as far as denying birth certificates and social security cards to U.S.-born infants. This brazen attack on immigrant children would deny them the right to be full members of American society and create a permanent, multigenerational subclass of potentially stateless noncitizens.
This order flies in the face of the 14th Amendment and goes against over 100 years of Supreme Court precedent. That’s why I’m calling on you, as my representative in Congress, to refuse to allow these attacks on birthright citizenship to stand.
Attacks on birthright citizenship would lead to an avalanche of consequences that would have permanent repercussions for American economic, cultural, and political life.
Only citizens can vote, serve in many elected offices, and participate in numerous other ways in American life. Excluding people from those opportunities because of their parents’ immigration status is simply un-American.
Every person born on U.S. soil has the right to full citizenship and to live life freely in the country where they were born. This executive order is shameful and unconstitutional, and as my representative, I hope you’ll do everything in your power to prevent enforcement.
Sincerely,
James Landrith
Woodbridge, VA
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Sent via ACLU.
February 20, 2025
Washington DC Office
1005 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2815
Woodbridge District Office
2241D Tacketts Mill Dr.
Woodbridge, VA 22192
Phone: (703) 987-2180
Dear Mr. Landrith,
Thank you for contacting me regarding immigration issues. I appreciate the opportunity to hear your thoughts on this issue.
America has always been a nation built on the ideals of freedom, opportunity, and the pursuit of a better life. As an immigrant and refugee from Soviet Ukraine, I arrived in the United States with my family at the age of 4. My father had $759 in his pocket, and we slept on our luggage our first night in JFK airport. But we came with deep faith in the American Dream – a dream rooted in equal opportunities for all. America has always been a special place for me, not just for its potential but for the values it represents. After all, there are few other places where a refugee from a repressive regime where freedom was a fantasy could one day serve his country as a Member of Congress.
However, despite the promise of America, our immigration system has been broken by years of inaction and a refusal in Congress to take common sense steps to both secure our borders while maintaining the values that make us Americans. For example, during the 118th Congress, a strong bipartisan immigration agreement was reached that would have ensured border security. Despite one of the most conservative Republican Senators leading those negotiations, extreme Republicans demanded that their colleagues oppose this bipartisan bill instead of taking meaningful action that could fix it. The bill would have provided $118 billion to enhance border security – for example, hiring more border patrol agents, expanding detention capacity, and surging resources to underfunded immigration courts to increase the speed at which we can process asylum cases.
As an immigrant and former prosecutor, there is nothing more important to me than ensuring we remain a country that welcomes immigrants, while also protecting our communities and our border. I look forward to working across the aisle to finally get this done.
Thank you again for reaching out. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any further concerns and questions. I look forward to hearing from you in the future!
Sincerely,
Congressman Eugene Vindman
Member of Congress
March 31, 2025
Dear Mr. Landrith:
Thank you for contacting me about birthright citizenship. I appreciate hearing from you.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted by Congress in 1866 and ratified by the states in 1868. Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment states a clear standard for U.S. citizenship. It states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”
This unequivocal language was adopted to fix a grievous problem — America’s embrace of slavery and shameful denial of U.S. citizenship to generations of African Americans born in the United States. The U.S. Supreme Court rendered one of its most notorious decisions — Dred Scott v. Sandford — in 1857. Under the guidance of Chief Justice Roger Taney, the Court found that no person of African descent, free or enslaved, no matter how long they or their family had lived in the United States, could ever be considered a citizen of the United States.
This decision was intensely controversial. It went far beyond Dred Scott’s situation and held that all 4 million enslaved Americans, as well as hundreds of thousands of free men and women, were not and could not be citizens of the only country they had ever known because of their origin. Two of the Justices dissented from the ruling and one resigned partially in protest over it. The backlash to the decision was one of the precipitating causes for the outbreak of the Civil War a few years later.
As the Civil War came to a close, with hundreds of thousands dead, much of the South in ruins, and slavery abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment, the reunified nation realized it needed to fix the damage done by the Dred Scott case. And to do so it added a clear standard for U.S. citizenship to the Constitution. Under Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, if you are born in America, citizenship is your birthright.
In the 1890s, birthright citizenship was challenged in the Supreme Court. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were not U.S. citizens. Wong traveled to China and was then denied re-entry to the United States based on the Chinese Exclusion Act, an egregious law of the time attempting to bar Chinese immigration. He sued to overturn the ban, and in 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong was indeed a U.S. citizen based on the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment. Lawyers attempted to argue, as some do today, that Wong Kim Ark, though born in the United States, was not “subject to the jurisdiction of” this country. But the Court dispatched this argument quickly by finding that Wong was clearly subject to the laws of the land of his birth. This ruling has been the clear understanding of American law ever since.
You are a U.S. citizen if you are born in America. Your right to U.S. citizenship does not depend on the status of your parents. This birthright was only guaranteed following incalculable bloodshed—the centuries-long depravity of slavery and the mass slaughter of the Civil War. The citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment was meant as an atonement for and repair of that suffering. Anyone who wants to reverse or curtail birthright citizenship is acting directly contrary to the plain meaning of the Constitution and Supreme Court precedent. And they are attempting to move our country back to a pre-Civil War mentality where certain kinds of people, though born in and long residing in the United States, are viewed as subordinate and unequal because of their parents’ status or their ancestry.
I have spoken on the Senate floor to make the above points in opposition to President Trump’s efforts to undermine the Constitution. I will continue to support efforts that uphold our nation’s core values. Thank you again for contacting me.
Sincerely,
Tim Kaine