What can we do about foreign drug cartel and terror leaders born in the U.S.?
Last year the Trump administration designated Mexico’s Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) as a terrorist group allowing the military to carry out strikes against it and its leadership, but the massive drug cartel across the border understands the weaknesses of our system all too well.That’s why its new leader has American citizenship.
Law enforcement, intelligence agencies and the military will have to jump through all sorts of legal hoops to spy on, target or take out Juan Carlos Valencia Gonzalez, who has a $5 million bounty on his head, but the best protection in the world because he was born in California.
The new cartel leader’s drug dealing Mexican parents had a baby in America. That child became a Mexican citizen who runs a Mexican drug cartel that the government has designated as being at war with the United States, and yet we can’t simply remove his citizenship.
And targeting the cartel boss without removing his citizenship will set off wails from Democrats and the Tucker Carlson wing of the GOP who still whine that the United States took out Anwar Al-Awlaki, the head of Al Qaeda’s Yemeni operation, a sworn enemy of America, who happened to be born here when his father, a grad student, was in New Mexico on a Fullbright scholarship.
Americans of a century ago would have been baffled that foreign enemy leaders who happened to be born to foreign nationals in this country were somehow immune to being killed in battle or that their citizenship couldn’t be quickly and easily removed. Back then most of our modern problems were unthinkable because committing treason, aligning with any foreign government, including joining its army or voting in its elections, marrying a foreigner or just returning to your home country meant denaturalization. (As did dodging the draft or deserting from the military.)
Had the common sense provisions of the Expatriation Act of 1907 or even the milder Nationality Act of 1940 been in force today, we wouldn’t have the farce of cartel and terrorist leaders who still hold our citizenship, active traitors with citizenship, ‘refugees’ who spend most of their time back home or a Somali senator linked to fraud who is still voting in Minnesota elections.
Under these provisions, Bill Clinton would have lost his citizenship and the’ refugees’ and ‘migrants’ who maintain homes abroad, the women who marry foreign nationals for cash to give them citizenship, and the anchor baby would be as extinct as the dodo.
Unfortunately a series of poorly grounded Supreme Court decisions unconstitutionally seized the powers of the executive and legislative branches to withdraw citizenship on most grounds based on a misreading of the notoriously poorly written Fourteenth Amendment.
The Warren Court’s deliberate misreading of the Fourteenth Amendment’s awkward attempt to define all black people as citizens “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power… are declared to be citizens” somehow trumped the clear language of Article I, Section 8, Clause 4 that Congress has the power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”. In a series of bad decisions, Supreme Court rulings argued that serving in a foreign military, desertion, marrying foreigners, voting abroad did not merit denaturalization.
These rulings relied on now widely discredited premises, such as defining the Constitution’s ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ term as being anything that the justices disapproved of, and “evolving standards of decency” which allowed judges to redefine the law to fit liberal mores. These abuses of judicial activism that reached their peak during the Warren Court also gutted the constitutional powers of Congress and made denaturalization a dead letter in the law.
By the time Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez held that a Mexican born in the United States who returned to Mexico to avoid military service couldn’t be stripped of his citizenship because it violated his due process, denaturalization was a dead letter that could hardly be utilized except for naturalization fraud by immigrants who had lied about not committing war crimes abroad.
This was not strictly true because the provisions punishing treason or allegiance to an enemy power with denaturalization are theoretically still in effect, but administrations haven’t had the stomach to try them out. The Trump administration may be willing to take on ‘treason citizenship’ and a more conservative Supreme Court may be willing to overturn Earl Warren.
Indeed even the Fourteenth Amendment had emphasized “not subject to any foreign power”.
Both the left and the right tend to misunderstand ‘birthright citizenship’. The Fourteenth Amendment’s accidental introduction of the foreign concept into American law helped demolish citizenship as a meaningful participatory act rather than the involuntary one it was elsewhere. --->READ MORE HERE
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