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An amicus curiae brief filed with the Supreme Court by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) claims that President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is “immoral” and “denies the innate dignity and freedom of the person.”
The bishops filed the brief last week, in the case of Trump v. Barbara, in conjunction with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. (CLINIC), identified in the brief as “a national non-profit organization established in 1988 by the USCCB” and “[g]uided by the Gospel imperative to welcome the stranger.”
CLINIC “protects the rights and promotes the dignity of immigrants through a network of over 415 Catholic and community-based legal immigration programs across 49 states and the District of Columbia,” the brief adds.
The bishops and CLINIC take issue with Trump’s executive order titled “Protecting the meaning and value of American Citizenship.”
In his order the president cites the Fourteenth Amendment’s provision that states “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump then notes that “[t]hat provision rightly repudiated the Supreme Court of the United States’s shameful decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford . . . which misinterpreted the Constitution as permanently excluding people of African descent from eligibility for United States citizenship solely based on their race.”
The bishops and CLINIC, however, claim that “the principle of birthright citizenship” is not only “woven into our Nation’s history and Western tradition,” but also “consistent with Catholic teaching.”
“Birthright citizenship aligns with the Church’s teaching that humans were created as social beings and that political authority is morally bound to affirm and protect the inherent dignity of every human person in the community,” the bishops state. “In turn, birthright citizenship reflects the Catholic principle of subsidiarity by recognizing persons as members of the community from birth, thereby enabling their participation in civic life and ensuring that state power serves the human person as a social being.”
The president’s executive order, the bishops and CLINIC argue, “purports to deny citizenship to children whose mother is ‘unlawfully present’ or has ‘temporary’ status, and whose father is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.”
“Amici’s opposition to the Executive Order is motivated by their firmly held belief that each person is endowed by God with an inherent dignity that confers certain ‘universal, inviolable, and inalienable’ rights,” they claim.
The bishops’ brief is yet another assault on the Trump administration’s focus on ending illegal immigration to the United States after millions of illegal immigrants were permitted to cross the nation’s borders during the Biden administration.
In an extensive interview with Crux published last week, United States Ambassador to the Holy See Brian Burch, a conservative Catholic, spoke plainly to the issue of immigration in the U.S.
“The administration of our immigration law is something where I suspect the Holy See and the United States will never be perfectly aligned, but I think that there’s something important here to emphasize and that is, these are two sets of moral goods that are often in tension,” Burch said.
The U.S., the ambassador explained, has a need to “protect the safety, security, and coherence of our laws,” while the Holy See’s perspective is “to welcome the stranger, to provide a sense of welcome to the poor and vulnerable that are seeking better lives.”
While these “moral tensions” exist, Burch said, what is important to know is that “this is not a set of evil policies rooted in hate or xenophobia. That is a false claim that has never been true.”
“Instead, it is a set moral goods, namely the safety, security, and prosperity of our citizens that has been in tension with a set of policies that was chaotic and disorderly,” he told Crux. “And how we resolve that is never going to be perfect.”
The amicus brief is by no means the U.S. Catholic bishops’ first attempt to discredit the Trump administration’s immigration policy – an agenda item that has been among the top priorities of the president’s constituents.
In November, the bishops delivered what was called a “special message” in which they condemned what they referred to as the Trump administration’s “indiscriminate mass deportation of people” in the country illegally.
Just as their “special message” drew both confusion and ire from numerous faithful Catholics, the same occurred this past week.
The Lepanto Institute – which self-describes as “a research and education organization dedicated to the defense of the Catholic Church against assaults from without as well as from within” – denounced the bishops’ amicus brief and its arguments.
“There is nothing unreasonable or immoral about this at all, but the USCCB and CLINIC decided to moralize it to such a degree that they have established an imaginary intrinsic right to such citizenship rooted in a bizarre notion of ‘human dignity,’” wrote Lepanto Institute founder Michael Hichborn.
He notes as well that the bishops and CLINIC chose attorney Matt Martens, a Virginia-based Baptist, according to his bio, to write their brief.
Hichborn finds Martens’ summary of “Catholic social teaching” on “birthright citizenship” somewhat “sketchy”:
Nowhere in the Compendium of Catholic Social Teaching, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, or any other aspect of the Magisterium is there any such claim regarding “birthright citizenship.” In fact, out of 195 recognized countries in the world, roughly 30 of them confer citizenship upon children by virtue of having been born in that country, and nearly all of them are countries in the Americas. None of the Catholic countries in Europe – including Italy and the Vatican – have any such notion of “birthright” citizenship, as they confer citizenship upon children born to parents who are citizens.
“No one from a foreign country is OWED citizenship,” Hichborn adds, asserting further that “every other argument supplied by this ridiculous amicus curiae falls flat on its face. Its conflated arguments, circular reasoning, leaps of logic, and false premises are so nearly impossible to follow that it is hard to argue against without tracking down indefinite rabbit holes just to properly define terms and to establish simple syllogisms.”
“The USCCB and CLINIC should be embarrassed for having put this forward,” he concludes.
Phil Lawler, the lead analyst at CatholicCulture.org, also didn’t mince any words when he called the bishops’ brief “an incoherent USCCB intervention.”
In a February 27th piece, the veteran Catholic journalist attempted to follow the logic of the bishops’ arguments.
“So is birthright citizenship—that is, the longstanding American policy offering citizenship to anyone born on US soil—an absolute requirement for human dignity?” Lawler asked. “If birthright citizenship is a fundamental human right, why has it not been recognized by most other nations? Why is it not accepted in Vatican City?”
“True, Vatican City is an unusual nation-state, with special legal status,” he admitted. “But if this is a fundamental human right, it should apply everywhere. And if it is not a fundamental human right, why are the US bishops presuming to speak on this highly charged political issue—going so far as to proclaim (as one section heading of the brief asserts) that Trump’s executive order is ‘immoral?’”
Lawler observed that exceptions to the birthright citizenship policy have always existed, citing the example that children born to foreign diplomats on U.S. soil are not automatically American citizens:
The charge that Trump’s order is depriving children of citizenship assumes that citizenship was owed to them. The Catholic Church has never taught that citizenship is a natural, God-given right. On the contrary, the Catholic tradition has recognized that states have the authority to set standards for citizenship.
“But the USCCB brief comes close to arguing that everyone has an inherent right to citizenship—and further, that Catholic social teaching demands this conclusion,” Lawler wrote. “By that logic, no nation can justly deny full citizenship to anyone born in that country.”
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