Being a child has never been easy in this country. But the weeks ahead may prove especially rough for kids, and even rougher for kids in immigrant families.
A House Judiciary subcommittee this week entertained justifications for why children of immigrants should be barred from public schools. The goal, outlined in detail by the conservative Heritage Foundation last month, is to manufacture a test case to overturn the 1977 Supreme Court decision in Plyler v. Doe, which determined that states may not deny undocumented children access to public education. Although the case broke 5-4, all nine justices, even the dissenting ones, agreed that it would be wrong to “tolerate creation of a segment of society made up of illiterate persons.” First Focus on Children filed testimony for the record at the hearing, noting that the SCOTUS decision has ensured that generations of students received the education they deserved and kept public schools from being turned into quasi-immigration enforcement agents. In addition, attacking the right of children to attend school, First Focus on Children President Bruce Lesley writes, is an attack on America’s core values.
The court will be in the spotlight again on April 1. That’s when the justices will hear arguments to determine whether all children born in this country get to be citizens or whether the Fourteenth Amendment applies only to certain children.
First Focus on Children has filed an amicus curiae brief in Trump v. Barbara (No. 25-365), urging the U.S. Supreme Court to affirm that birthright citizenship is a fundamental constitutional right guaranteed to every baby born in the United States. The brief, filed late last month alongside leading child advocacy organizations and nationally recognized experts in child health, psychology, and rights, makes clear that President Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which purports to end birthright citizenship for hundreds of thousands of children born each year, would cause immediate, irreparable, and lasting harm to babies and children across America. In addition to the brief, Bruce Lesley writes that “Even though it is right there in the name – “birth” – policymakers and the media often ignore the critically important children’s angle to this and other policy issues. Children, and in this case, babies, are often treated as an afterthought.”
In like a lion, out like a lion.