Rond Abdel-Fattah
speaker
33 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Rond Abdel-Fattah’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So you can imagine the fear that Wong Kim Ark might have been feeling as month after month went by without a decision. And it's the sign the Supreme Court was really struggling with what to do in this case and how to decide it. And his lawyers were probably also greatly concerned. But they were brilliant lawyers.
And they told the Supreme Court, if you rule for the government, that the children of immigrants are not citizens, you will take away citizenship from hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people, including lots of white people. And the court heard that loud and clear and even noted that in its opinion.
On March 28th, they issued a ruling, six to two, because they were down a member, so only eight members. And Justice Gray authors the opinion.
Regardless of the immigration status of their parents are citizens of the United States.
The court focused on that language, that all persons, this is intended to apply to everyone. And it's not intended to be so restrictive as to take away citizenship or bar citizenship from the children of immigrants. And remember, the United States is a nation of immigrants. It's not like there's just a few people who are born to non-citizen parents.
It's a significant percentage of the country every year is born to immigrant parents.
And then the court threw in at the very end, they said, and if we were to rule any other way, we would take citizenship away from lots of children of not just the quote unquote obnoxious Chinese, which is how the court often referred to this group, but also the children of English immigrants and German immigrants and French immigrants.
That, I think, also pragmatically led them to say, no, Wong Kim Ark, we're ruling for you, not so much because we're sympathetic to children of Chinese immigrants, but because we can't undo the citizenship of the children of immigrants in this country.
Well, I would love to say it was a fully happy ending. His problems were not over in part because the U.S. government didn't fully give up. It gave up on that formal legal argument. But I feel in some ways they just switched the battle to other venues.
So Wong knew that if he wanted to leave the country again, he would have to prove to everyone's satisfaction, all of these white immigration inspectors, that he was the man who'd won the Supreme Court case, that he was Wong K. Mark, that he was a citizen born in the United States.
And that if they disbelieved him, he'd be stuck all over again in the steerage hold of a steamship trying to argue he could enter his country. And that must have made him very leery to even think about leaving the United States.
He was living in El Paso, Texas, just a few years later after his win, in October of 1901, living and working there, and he was arrested and charged with being a Chinese immigrant, not a native-born American, a Chinese immigrant who was illegally in the United States. He had to post a $300 bond
And it took months before he could convince these officials, I'm the guy who won the Supreme Court case establishing birthright citizenship. That's who I am. I am a citizen who gets to stay. This is the racial profiling of its time.
Showing 21–33 of 33 · page 2 of 2
← Previous