Think About It: Revoking Birthright Citizenship Would Make All Americans Vulnerable to Political Persecution, Detention, and Deportation. That’s the Plan.

The Supreme Court has now heard the arguments of the Trump administration and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) regarding birthright citizenship as spelled out in the 14th amendment. Now we wait for the decision.

How will this decision impact not some, not most, but all, Americans?

In the way this issue has been covered and discussed, it’s not at all clear to me that the majority of Americans fully understand the stakes of this decision and how the efforts of the Trump administration, with Stephen Miller pulling the strings of the wonderfully awful wizard Trump, fit within a larger plan to redefine American identity and citizenship and thus grant, limit, or outright cancel rights to Americans on the basis of that redefinition.

Conventional understandings of the stakes of revoking birthright citizenship tend to focus on what the decision will mean for the children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.  The stakes are much higher and implications much broader because if birthright citizenship is revoked, the very definitional foundations of citizenship will be unsettled, calling every American’s citizenship into question, which I believe is the Trump administration’s goal.

Just consider the facts that ICE has been given license to detain people using racial profiling and has in fact indiscriminately detained American citizens.  It is less about whether or not one actually enjoys legal citizenship than it is pursuing terror as a form of control and governance and labeling acts of defiance to ICE’s extralegal terrorist campaign as un-American.

Ask yourself this: how do you prove your citizenship now? If an ICE agent were to approach you and ask for proof of citizenship, what would you provide? Your driver’s license? A state identification card? Your library card? Your employee identification badge? These don’t quite really do it.

And say you had a birth certificate or social security card with you, would that do the trick? Well, say birthright citizenship has been revoked and your birth certificate thus doesn’t prove citizenship. Then what?

You see where this is going. If there’s no birthright citizenship, what makes anybody a citizen?

If we look back at National Security Presidential Memorandum/NSPM-7, issued on Sept. 25, 2025, we can discern where the Trump administration is going in terms of developing a new litmus test for citizenship rooted in a narrow conservative belief system that itself defies foundational American principles of freedom of speech and thought. In this memo we find a presidential directive that authorizes preemptive law enforcement actions against Americans not for any violent or illegal actions they’ve taken but for their ideological and political beliefs.

Though neither Charlie Kirk’s murderer nor the shooter who purportedly attempted to assassinate Trump can be linked to “anti-fascist” politics, Trump nonetheless invokes those episodes as evidence of a wave of anti-fascist political violence, as he writes,

There are common recurrent motivations and indicia uniting this pattern of violent and terroristic activities under the umbrella of self-described “anti-fascism.”  These movements portray foundational American principles (e.g., support for law enforcement and border control) as “fascist” to justify and encourage acts of violent revolution.

This “anti-fascist” lie has become the organizing rallying cry used by domestic terrorists to wage a violent assault against democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and fundamental American liberties.  Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.

So, if, like Senator Bernie Sanders or Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one identifies with socialist as opposed to capitalist politics, then one can be labeled an un-American domestic terrorist and, presumably, deprived of citizenship rights and, it would seem to follow, detained or deported.

And the language here is frighteningly vague when we consider terms such as “anti-Americanism,” “anti-Christianity,” or “extremism on migration, race, and gender.” If one expresses one’s Jewish or Islamic beliefs, or one’s atheism, does that constitute “anti-Christianity”? If one speaks out against white Christian nationalism, is that “anti-Christianity”?

If one supports gay marriage or is in a gay marriage or supports transgender rights or is transgender, is one expressing “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”?

What we see here is an effort to define American-ness, and by extension American identity and citizenship, I think, in terms of belief and values and thus, as this memorandum, enable the persecution of people as domestic terrorists on the basis of their “un-American” beliefs and values.

The memorandum also forecloses the possibility of legitimate anti-fascist politics and acts of resistance, as any expression of anti-fascism or resistance to fascism is already declared to be un-American, as domestic terrorism.

I could write for pages on the irony here of Trump defining American values and beliefs given his repeated violations of the Constitution.

I don’t want to lose track of the main point to be underlined here which is that the revocation of birthright citizenship will impact all Americans and enable violent crackdowns and persecution of any American who supports LGBTQ rights, racial and gender equality, curbing the abuses and inequality endemic to capitalism, religious pluralism, and who knows what else might fall under the umbrella of “anti-Americanism.”

Birthright citizenship, I hope we can see, actually functions as a powerful foundational right for other bedrock American freedoms.

The revocation of birthright citizenship would render all Americans vulnerable to state repression, violence, and persecution.