During the three months that Juan Pablo Quivano was held at North Lake immigration detention center, he worried about his wife, Dayana Ramirez. The couple is due to have their first child later this summer, and Ramirez’s pregnancy has been wrought with complications.
“My biggest fear was not being there for her delivery,” Quivano said.
Back home after being granted bond, the Colombian asylum seeker said he developed another worry: that his child might not be a U.S. citizen, if the Supreme Court decided to do away with “birthright citizenship.”
In a 6-3 decision issued on Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right to citizenship for nearly all people born in the country in nearly all cases. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts called birthright citizenship “a promise to ‘every free-born person in this land’” and said the court would “keep the promise.”
At issue in the decision was a portion of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which 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."
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel called the decision a "monumental victory.”
Nessel made a personal connection to the issue at an immigrants’ rights event on Monday, telling a crowd of some 200 people that her grandparents fled the Holocaust. They were able to restart their lives in the U.S., as many of their relatives were killed for their faith.
“My father became a citizen through birthright citizenship,” she said. “And then just one generation later, his daughter became the top lawyer in a state of over 10 million people. Because that is how immigration works. And that is what makes America truly great.
Emmanuel Flores-Haro was born in the U.S. to undocumented parents, the experience has not been as roundly positive.
Immigration officers detained his father last year; he was deported after six months in custody. Flores-Haro has had to pick up another job to help his family make ends meet.
He’s often exhausted after his back-to-back shifts hauling freight and stocking merchandise.
”I leave one [job and] I immediately go to the other,” he said.
Still, Flores-Haro, said that without the benefits conferred by citizenship to the children of immigrants, he might have had a harder time finding work.
“Everyone feels the pains of the economy right now,” he said. “Everyone knows it is a struggle to keep your family fed, maintained and afloat.”
To him, the Constitution has always been clear: “Anyone who is born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen.”
