The South Asian American Justice Collaborative (SAAJCO) joined hundreds of community members, advocates, and partners outside the U.S. Supreme Court as the Justices heard oral arguments in the birthright citizenship case.
“The energy today was powerful,” said Chirag Shah, Program Manager at SAAJCO. “People showed up because this is about something fundamental. It’s about recognizing that when one community is impacted, we all are, and that’s why we organize together.”
SAAJCO also submitted an amicus brief in the case, highlighting the long history of South Asian communities in the United States and pushing back on the notion that South Asians are “forever foreign.” The brief further outlines the harms our communities would face if the executive order is upheld.
“Two things stood out today. Justice Sotomayor rightly raised the denaturalization of South Asians after Thind and whether changes to birthright citizenship could be applied retroactively. Reading new conditions into the Fourteenth Amendment is already deeply concerning. While the government offered assurances about limiting its scope, those limits may not hold over time. This administration has not thought through how far-reaching the implications are,” said Kalpana V. Peddibhotla, Executive Director of SAAJCO. “Second, the government relied on the idea of ‘temporary visitors’ to argue that birthright citizenship should turn on domicile. That directly implicates families who have lived here for years or decades on H-1B visas, in asylum, and in other statuses due to green card backlogs.”
“The Court raised concerns about the administrative burdens that would ensue if this Order is upheld. For South Asians, the second largest growing immigrant demographic, that means many babies would be denied citizenship at birth,” said Anisa Rahim, Legal Director of SAAJCO. “Many South Asian countries will not automatically confer citizenship on those babies affected by the Order, rendering them stateless.”
SAAJCO led a coalition of South Asian civil rights and community organizations in filing an amicus brief in the United States Supreme Court defending the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. The brief was filed in partnership with Davis Wright Tremaine LLP and joined by South Asian focused and allied organizations nationwide.
Drawing on the long and often overlooked history of South Asian presence in the United States, the brief explains how South Asian communities have, for centuries, sought to assert their rights of citizenship and belonging.
As the brief states:
“In short, for centuries, South Asian Americans have been woven into the nation’s economic, political, and social fabric. When they have been treated as outsiders, it has been not because of a lack of contribution or commitment, but because of racialized judgments about who belongs.”
The brief warns that conditioning recognition of citizenship at birth on parental immigration status would undermine settled constitutional law and destabilize families who have relied on the guarantee that children born here are Americans.
“We are not forever foreign. South Asian children born here are Americans. That is what the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees,” said Peddibhotla.