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Notes -
https://floridaphoenix.com/2025/04/17/u-s-born-man-held-for-ice-under-floridas-new-anti-immigration-law/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/us-born-citizen-detained-ice-immigration-florida-rcna201800
A Florida State Trooper claimed a natural born citizen admitted to entering the country illegally. Thankfully, his family was able to prove his citizenship to a state judge. Unfortunately, ICE requested Florida keep him in custody, for an as-yet not-public reason, and Florida has done so, despite the citizen not being charged with any state crime, other than an unenforceable statute against illegal immigrants entering Florida, of which he was already proven innocent, even if it were enforceable. He was later released, thankfully.
Any data on the rate of these sorts of things happening, in the past? Should or shouldn't this be worrying and why?
I remember something like it happening once during the first Trump administration. Guy was born in Texas to a Mexican immigrant mother. Details are fuzzy, but the gist was that the mother was playing games with the son's citizenship status when he was little to make it easier to travel back and forth from Texas to Mexico and didn't actually have proof that he was an American citizen. The situation ended up getting resolved after it made the news, and a retired maternity nurse remembered the mother and scrounged up some sort of personal memento (thank you note on hospital letterhead or something) that helped confirm the guy's status.
From your first link:
I wonder if there's some similar thing where even though he's a citizen, he traveled internationally in less-than legal methods.
It bothers me that I was born a citizen by blood, but my parents still had to do more paperwork to establish that than these guys who slip across the border and don't speak English.
I’m a bit unsympathetic to the idea of people claiming US citizenship when they’ve basically always lived in another country. It’s bad faith. Your mother gamed the system by giving birth in America (jackpot! US citizenship!) but then as soon as she’s medically cleared she goes home and raises the kid as (in this case) a Mexican, doesn’t pay taxes, doesn’t teach him English or about the USA. Like, he should not be a citizen as he has no actual connection to America other than his mother crossing the border specifically to give birth, and even then could not be bothered to pay for supporting documentation. Birth tourism is not something we should allow.
I'd also say it's likely that the people who enshrined jus soli for the United States could never imagine a world where a (common) pregnant women could not only travel, but also give safely give birth in a foreign land that they were not intent on living in for the rest of their lives, or that they would even want to!
I'm curious how opposition to jus soli has evolved over time to match the world that we live in due to technological advances (e.g. maternal mortality rates).
I think it need at minimum an establishment of residence of some sort, preferably several years. If you have to live in the country legally, pay taxes, have a residences within the country, I get that. But I just cannot logically justify the idea that I could cross the border while in labor, go to the emergency room in Brownsville TX, pop out a baby, and that baby being legally American. I’m not even sure you couldn’t push this to absurdity— like if only my Uterus enters the United States and the baby comes out at the border, is that enough to satisfy jus soli or does the entire woman have to physically cross the border for the baby to be a citizen?
Imagine a pregnant woman sticking her butt through the bars in the border wall and pushing the baby out though the crack.
It a legitimate thought experiment. I mean there’s a point at which you reach absurdity and singularity and quite often can point out the problems with the idea in question. If I can basically stick my ass through a fence and pop the baby out and it’s a citizen of the country, I think the absurdity of the idea is clear. You just can’t coherently have citizenship grant rights and not have at least some form control over who gets the benefits.
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