Conservatives Meet to Make Birthright Citizenship Their Long-Term Project

Just weeks after the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s sweeping bid to end birthright citizenship, his conservative allies were bucking one another up and insisting that the loss in court was fuel for the movement.

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“There’s going to be a lot of focus on this issue, both in legal academia from some, but not exclusively, conservative law professors,” Iowa Solicitor General Eric Wessan, told POLITICO. “There’s now a lot of interest in this area, and when you get the truth-seeking function of academia set on an interesting question, you’re naturally going to elicit a lot of responses, and that’s going to keep the issue fresh.”

Wessan was one of several conservative lawyers, former Trump aides and immigration hawks who mingled over pastries and coffee in late July at the conservative gathering place Bellator Hall near Capitol Hill, where they discussed the future of the movement. Well understood is that it’s a fight that may outlast some of those in the room, a decades-long battle akin to the effort to end a constitutional right to an abortion or overturn the doctrine of Chevron deference, which held that courts should defer to an agency’s stance when interpreting an ambiguous statute.

“They turned birthright citizenship into the next Roe v. Wade, that we’re going to have to spend the next 50 years overturning,” Mike Davis, the founder of Article III Project, a Trump-aligned legal organization, said at the event. “They have destroyed our most crucial sovereign power as we the people, which is our sovereignty, controlling who comes and goes and who becomes one of us.”

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The president’s allies said they plan to make ending birthright citizenship a recurring topic at conferences and law schools where the next generation of lawyers will be trained. And even as the prospects of legislation remain slim, they are pressing lawmakers to introduce bills ranging from constitutional amendments to narrower measures targeting women who come to the U.S. just to give birth. They also view it as a moment to expand broader immigration enforcement efforts, to ramp up deportations and deter migration to the U.S.

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