Deporting “native born” terrorist supporters from America.
Terrorists running around cities waving the flags of Islamic terror groups could have easily been removed from the United States, even if they were born in this country, until the 1960s.
That’s when the Warren Court detonated one of the ‘bombs’ buried in the 14th Amendment.
The 14th Amendment, passed during a period of suspension of civil liberties and legal norms after the Civil War, was an example of why the Framers made it so difficult to add amendments to the Constitution and why adding them is usually a bad idea. Unconstitutional, punitive and sloppily written, the ticking time bombs in the 14th in just the past few years were exploited to try and ban Trump from running for office (Section 3), to allow Biden to bypass Congress on spending (Section 4) and to force women to compete against ‘transgender’ men (Section 1.)
But the biggest time bomb in the 14th Amendment was birthright citizenship.
The 14th Amendment had set out to end once and for all the debate about black citizenship that had been argued in cases like the Dred Scott decision by confirming citizenship for former slaves and their descendants. While Section 1 had set out to stop Southern states from suppressing black voters, its sloppy language created the entire civil rights industry and automatically made anyone born in the United States a citizen regardless of anything else.
The pregnant Chinese tourists coming to America to give birth and the illegal alien invaders who cross the border knowing that all they need to do is have a child in this country to become undeportable are the products of a fundamental misreading of the aims of Section 1.
While birthright citizenship is a problem, treason citizenship is an even bigger one.
Even long before the Cold War, laws had been put into place to cope with the unintended consequences of birthright citizenship by closely regulating denaturalization and expatriation.
Up until the 60s, serving in a foreign army, voting in a foreign election or plotting treason would result in the removal of citizenship from any citizen, naturalized or native born, then the ACLU, founded as a Communist front group, succeeded in convincing the Warren Court that the 14th Amendment also protected the citizenship rights of a Communist and of foreign allegiance.
Under decades of Democrat rule, denaturalization became a dead letter, occasionally used to remove immigrants who had committed war crimes, while not applying it even to open enemies. When Anwar Al-Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen, was droned, the Obama administration did not try going through the process of ‘expatriating’ the son of Yemeni immigrants.
The process of removing the Al Qaeda leader’s citizenship should have been straightforward under 8 U.S. Code § 1481 which states that a “person who is a national of the United States whether by birth or naturalization, shall lose his nationality” by such acts as “taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision”, “entering, or serving in, the armed forces of a foreign state if (A) such armed forces are engaged in hostilities against the United States” and “committing any act of treason against, or attempting by force to overthrow, or bearing arms against, the United States.”
The evidence against Al-Awlaki (pictured above) was overwhelming from his own speeches and statements alone, but the Warren Court had ensured that these had to apply voluntarily and intentionally.
Anwar Al-Awlaki could not lose his citizenship by joining Al Qaeda and calling for the destruction of America unless he announced that he was doing this to renounce his citizenship. The manifest absurdity of this also means that every Al Qaeda, ISIS or Hezbollah Islamic terrorist can call for the destruction of America while his citizenship is protected by the Constitution.
This was not what the 14th Amendment, which specifically legislated (excessively) against insurrection had in mind. Rather than preventing insurrection, the Warren Court had twisted the 14th into protecting it, and not just by domestic enemies, but also by foreign enemies.
The Constitution made little mention of these things because the Framers had not been concerned with protecting the right to citizenship, but with the right to end citizenship.
The British doctrine of “Perpetual Allegiance”, common to all monarchies, held that no one could ever abandon citizenship. That doctrine was the difference between the self-conception of the Founding Fathers as patriots founding a new nation and the British monarchy’s conception of them as traitors. The Declaration of Independence took pains to challenge Perpetual Allegiance that a people have the right “to dissolve the political bands” making them founders, not traitors.
America was not built on the Perpetual Allegiance of one people to a dynasty, but the free-willed allegiance of individuals to a nation. Citizenship had to be by choice and its allegiance could not be free unless it could also be broken. Expatriation, the abandonment of citizenship, was at the heart of the American Revolution during which a majority chose to become citizens of a new nation and a minority did not, and moved to Canada or back to England.
The 14th Amendment unintentionally restored Perpetual Allegiance. The Warren Court and other legal decisions asserted that everyone was a citizen unless they took specific action to opt out. And about the only ones who bother going through the process are trying to dodge taxes.
Anwar Al-Awlaki did not bother “making a formal renunciation of nationality before a diplomatic or consular officer of the United States” and so we could kill him, but not expatriate him.
Recently, Freedom Center Investigates learned that ‘Muhammad’ Tahir Javed, a Biden surrogate, Democratic National Committee deputy finance chair, and top Biden bundler who had “raised over $2M for the Biden Harris transition team”, had become a Pakistani cabinet member.
On the other side of the political aisle, Mehmet Oz, a Turkish national, had become the GOP nominee for the Pennsylvania Senate seat in 2022, and rather than giving up his citizenship in an Islamic terrorist state, had suggested that he might not participate in classified briefings.
The enforcement of 8 U.S. Code § 1481 would have stopped this kind of behavior along with the mobs of terrorist supporters waving Jihadi flags rampaging around American cities.
Article 1 Section 8 clearly empowered Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization”. Congress, after much debate, failed to act until much later, when under a reign of leftist terror in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it used those powers allocated to it by the Constitution to clarify the terms under which American citizens, both native-born and naturalized, might lose their citizenship by aligning with enemy powers and trying to destroy America. The Warren court rolled back this measure to protect Communist activists from Cold War era crackdowns.
Like much of the fallout from the Warren court’s various unconstitutional decisions, the current state of affairs of denaturalization and expatriation remains a self-contradictory mess.
The Warren court’s absolutist position that Congress has no right to remove citizenship under any circumstances because of the 14th Amendment (even though the 14th Amendment was meant to prevent states from treating former slaves as non-citizens) is not actually the case because denaturalization is still occasionally implemented for war criminals. If ex-Nazis and others who lied on their immigration forms can be denaturalized for committing fraud, then Congress still has the power to strip away citizenship from particular individuals.
But even the “constitutional right to remain a citizen” supposedly created by the 14th Amendment according to the Warren court does not preclude the removal of it when appropriate on the basis of individual actions. That is how the First Amendment is implemented in prisons.
The failure to clarify and pursue expatriation has been a legislative and judicial failure.
After 9/11, the federal government and the conservative judiciary should have intelligently dissected the obvious contradictions from that era and revamped a workable denaturalization and expatriation policy. Instead the same system that tried and failed to uphold treating enemy combatants as such hardly even bothered to bring back comprehensive expatriation reform.
The Islamic terrorist supporters rioting in our cities are the result of these post 9/11 failures.
The legal basis for deporting non-citizen terrorist supporters is fairly straightforward and needs to be implemented immediately, but there is also an accompanying need to address the growing number of ‘enemy citizens’ residing in this country. Generations of open borders and mass migration has made it possible for many Islamic terrorist allies to be born in this country.
Birthright citizenship and treason citizenship remain major obstacles to securing the nation.
While the birthright citizenship problem posed by the 14th Amendment is not as easily dealt with, the legal infrastructure to deal with treason citizenship is already in place. What is needed is the will to deal with it before terrorist supporters stop being a minority and become a majority.
40 rounds says
Leftist -communists have no problem with foreigners effing up the country as long as it helps their evil purposes, hence their love affair with open borders, tin horn dictators, and interpreting the Constitution to serve their agenda.
somehistory says
When lawbreakers rule….
and in a recent vote, only a few dems in Congress voted to say illegals can’t vote so being a “citizen” means little these days
JS says
Of course it doesn’t because look who is in Congress! Many are enemies from the beginning, with parents from foreign enemy nations. Others may be the liberals or what’s called the “useful idiots” that historically have enabled nations to fall or be conquered.
Patriot64 says
Those terrorist Americans who support international terrorism have two options go to prison for supporting terrorism or renounce their citizenship and leave the country and never return.
Ray Jarman says
I have asked many times and I have yet to obtain a rational answer as to how George Soros ever obtained citizenship being that he was a NATZI collaborator. It appears that money collected at the expense of Jews during the Second World War was not enough to protect the nation from such a despicable individual.
PMK says
Forget denaturalization or revocation of citizenship. We can’t even deport people who come here illegally. The nation-state is all but dead. Migration is now a human right. We’re told that people do not have a right to cross any international boundary at will but that is what is happening. There are policies in international law that seem to prohibit discrimination based on, among other things: religion or belief, nationality, migration or residence status or other status. This suggests, to me anyway, that we cannot deny entry and we cannot deport those who pose a danger to the country or who enter the country illegally. Once they enter the country, they’re here to stay..
https://www.ohchr.org/en/migration/international-standards-governing-migration-policy
࿗Infidel࿘ says
It’s time to disintegrate the UN & all its derivative bodies. We should take the lead, & I’ll bet even the likes of Russia and China will follow, making the UN as worthless as the “Non Aligned Movement” (yeah, it still exists)
WWII ended the League of Nations. Biden seems determined to take us into WWIII, so that he will be remembered as a wartime president, like Roosevelt or even Bush 43. It’s another thing that he’s totally incapable of handling it, should it come to that
John1 says
This Supreme Court could undo the Warren court’s decision.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Not sure: ACB and Kavanaugh are totally unreliable, and have come out w/ weird decisions. Only Neil Gorsuch has been good. Other worry is that both Thomas and Alito are getting to retirement ages, and not sure whether the next SCOTUS justices that President Trump appoints will be like them, as opposed to ACB. I hope he looks beyond the Federalist Society for his nominees
tgusa says
“running around cities waving the flags of Islamic terror groups could have easily been removed from the United States, even if they were born in this country, until the 1960s”
Yes they could have been removed but now we have a whole different and larger problem.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4250851/posts
We might soon find out if we are more bad-ass when it comes to our country than they are.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Daniel
Very good analysis of the Anwar al-Alwaki incident. To this day, in debates about executive overreach, I hear this incident mentioned, particularly by Republicans/Libertarians, who I’d otherwise agree w/ on other aspects of this topic of executive overreach
➤ First of all, there is an underlying assumption that all American blood is sacred, & so government can’t do a thing against American citizens that it can do to foreigners. I just don’t see how the passport one holds would give one a “Get out of Jail Free” card that another person, who doesn’t hold it, would automatically get dinged for, to one level or another
➤ In al-Alwaki’s case, aside from birth, there was no other way he was a citizen. Naturalized citizens, such as me, have a Civics lesson that we have to undergo and take an oath of loyalty to this country. Whereas birthright citizens don’t have to do a thing in their lives: they automatically get it the moment they attain majority. I like the idea of Vivek Ramaswamy that all Americans should have to pass the same Civics test in order to get that right to vote before 25
➤ Dual citizenship is something I get some people might want simply due to the convenience of freely working in either countr, but many countries don’t have that at all, defeating the purpose. It should be fine for the US to outlaw it altogether
➤ It’s a good thing that Dr Oz lost, since nobody in the campaigns could question his dual-loyalty to two adversarial countries. Turkey may be a NATO member (which a lot of people think it shouldn’t), but it’s definitely an adversary of the US and not an ally
➤ Also recently, Lt Col Alexander Vindman revealed, when questioned, that he had been offered the job of Defense Minister of Ukraine. Aside from Tucker Carlson, no one thought it worth questioning how did Ukraine determine that despite being an American citizen, he was credibly loyal to Ukraine
I do think birthright citizenship should be ended. On top of that, the question that is often asked of Republicans – whether they would deport all 10 or 20 million, or whatever the number is, is a red herring. I was surprised that even a private citizen like Ben Shapiro, when questioned by Eric Swalwell, didn’t give it an unqualified yes, but made a carveout for people who had been a net benefit to the US
The reason that question is a red herring is that law enforcement doesn’t stop prosecuting crimes just b’cos they can’t get every perpetrator of the said crimes. The IRS doesn’t avoid pursuing people just b’cos they can’t catch all tax cheats. Traffic cops don’t avoid ticketing speeders just b’cos a lot of other people are passing them at 70mph even while they’re writing a motorist a ticket. One of my friends once told me about someone who asked a cop, after he was nailed for speeding, why he didn’t write up the other people who were speeding. The cop replied, “When you go fishing, you catch one fish at a time”. That response had no comeback ?
So yeah, people who support deportation should just say “Yes” when questioned about the numbers. In reality, once they see large numbers of people being deported, not only will other illegals leave on their own, but others making the trek from Brazil to Del Rio or Tijuana will either use the proper immigration channels, or pick another country. They’re not gonna accumulate in Mexico, and not will Mexico tolerate them either. Just make deportation a standard policy, and deport away
Oh, and change whatever legal immigration laws need to change, be it abolishing birthright citizenship, removing DACA, increasing the English proficiency requirements for new citizens and so on
Constance says
Bravo , Infidel
Westpacwill says
In my time in our Foreign Service in the US Embassy Quito, Ecuador, we had the same problem. CINCSOUTH (4-star general) came with his staff to the Embassy to participate in discussions about an issue with Ecuador, which remains classified to this day.
One junior officer on his staff was a naturalized citizen from Ecuador who had a security clearance because of assignment to the 4-star’s staff. The discussion between that staff and the Country Team, headed by Ambassador, or course, was conducted in the safe room, designed to prevent eavesdropping and swept for bugs constantly.
The decision was averse to the desires of Ecuador’s government, primarily due to the input of two members of the Country Team. Before the 4-star left country, the Ecuadorian Chief of Military Staff made two demands of him — expel those two members who had convinced the Ambassador to reject the Ecuadorian proposal. No reason given, just demanded.
Country Team was convinced that the Ecuadorian-American officer had acted as a mole, providing a detailed summary of the Country Team meeting to the Ecuadorian Chief of Staff, which was nothing short of treason in our opinion.
Largely for that reason (I’ve always believed), Ambassador refused 4-star’s demand those two Embassy officials be expelled from the Embassy. The suspected mole in a US military uniform never returned to our Embassy again either, (again, as I’ve believed) for the same reason.
࿗Infidel࿘ says
Interesting!
Thanks for that story
Robert Bollow says
What is a pledge of loyalty to Islam if it is not subversive? The goal of Islam is political and intends to subjugate all people under Islam where their rights are denied by a god, not granted by God. Thinking in terms of these words from 8 U.S. Code § 1481 : “taking an oath or making an affirmation or other formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state or a political subdivision” Islamic allegiance fulfills this and is not a religion in the western sense of what can be protected by the 1st Amendment.