Another important post on this national tragedy.

 

Senate confronts the question of birthright citizenship

Witnesses came in for and against. Who made the better case?

Wendi Strauch Mahoney | March 17, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

At the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution’s March 10 hearing, “Protecting American Citizenship: Birthright Citizenship for Illegal Aliens and Tourists,” senators and witnesses confronted the fundamental question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause has been stretched beyond its meaning.  Attorney Charles J. Cooper, Professor Ilan Wurman, and author and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer argued that current doctrine is too broad.  Professor Amanda Frost and Marine veteran Alejandro Barranco defended birthright citizenship as both constitutionally settled and central to the American civic tradition.

Cooper offered legal arguments for restriction, arguing that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means “full and complete” jurisdiction, “requiring a permanent reciprocal political bond between the parents of the new citizen and the United States.”  He added that a “reciprocal bond” means “an enduring allegiance,” reserved for those “who have made this country their lawful and permanent home.”  It does not apply to children of parents who are here temporarily, even if they are lawful visitors to the United States.  As such, Cooper argued, it follows that children of illegal aliens “are excluded as well.”  He said that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment modeled the citizenship clause after the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which he argued “unequivocally excluded from birthright citizenship children of aliens here temporarily and of aliens who have deliberately entered the country illegally.”

Wurman explained that the original common-law and Fourteenth Amendment understanding of birthright citizenship turned not on mere birthplace, but on whether the child’s parents were lawfully under the sovereign’s protection and thus subject to its full jurisdiction — an argument that would exclude at least the children of illegal aliens, and possibly some children of temporary visitors, from automatic citizenship at birth.

Frost argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause guarantees birthright citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, with only the traditional narrow exceptions for children of diplomats, enemy occupiers, and historically members of sovereign Indian tribes, and that this understanding is supported by the text, the 1866 debates, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, and more than a century of federal practice and case law.

She contended that President Trump’s Executive Order 14160 is an unconstitutional attempt to rewrite both the Constitution and 8 USC §1401(a) by denying citizenship to children born here to illegal aliens and many temporary lawful visitors, and she rejected the administration’s alternative theories based on “allegiance,” parental “domicile,” or federal “consent” as arguments unsupported by the citizenship clause’s actual language or history.  Frost also stated that the consequences of adopting the Trump administration’s policies “would be dire for all families in the U.S.”

Specifically, Frost predicted that if the executive order were to remain in effect, its consequences would be sweeping: roughly 250,000 children born each year to legal temporary immigrants and illegal aliens could be treated as noncitizens from birth and denied Social Security numbers, passports, and access to benefits, with some potentially rendered stateless and even subject to removal despite being newborns.  The disruption would not stop with those families, according to Frost.  Parents across the country, including green card holders and even U.S. citizens, could be forced to prove their own legal status at the time of a child’s birth before that child would be recognized as American, even though hospitals and state agencies are not set up to collect or verify that kind of complex immigration documentation.  In effect, Frost said, “the United States would have replaced the egalitarian rule that we are all American at birth with a test of lineage and ancestry — a legal rule at odds with our Constitution and antithetical to the nation’s founding values.”

Barranco brought a compelling and personal perspective to the hearing.  Born in the United States to Mexican immigrants, he proudly served in the Marines and was “taught to respect the flag, to be thankful for the opportunities this country gave me and to give back whenever I could.”  He told senators that birthright citizenship is what made it possible for him to attend school, graduate, enlist in the Marine Corps, and serve the country, and he argued that Americans are judged by allegiance and service, not by where their parents were born.  He also shared that he “raised three sons who all chose to serve as Marines.”

Schweizer’s testimony was arguably the most thought-provoking and timely because it shifted the hearing away from a purely legal dispute over the Fourteenth Amendment and recast birthright citizenship as a long-term national security and sovereignty issue, especially in relation to China.  According to Schweizer, birth tourism is being deliberately exploited by PRC nationals and CCP-linked elites who travel to U.S. soil so their children acquire automatic American citizenship.  Ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) challenged Schweizer’s claims, saying they were “ridiculous.”

Schweizer then cited estimates of 50,000 to 100,000 Chinese birth tourism cases annually and claimed that over time, this may have produced from roughly 750,000 to 1.5 million Chinese nationals with U.S. citizenship by birth.  Many of those children end up moving back to China while keeping their U.S. passports.  Schweizer explained,

These individuals grow up in China, often educated in CCP-controlled schools with distorted views of U.S. history, values, and culture. They have no lived connection or demonstrated allegiance to our country, yet they possess full rights as U.S. citizens: the ability to vote in elections, relocate here at will, and — upon turning 21 — sponsor their parents as permanent residents.

Schweizer also highlighted U.S.-based surrogacy arrangements involving Chinese clients and politically connected figures, arguing that Beijing tolerates or encourages these practices because they create strategic advantages, including future voting rights, residency options, and family-based immigration pathways.  Citing a “prominent example” of such surrogacy arrangements, Schweizer continued,

A prominent example emerged in May 2025, when authorities discovered 15 children, ages two months to 13 years, in an Arcadia, California, mansion owned by a Chinese businessman and CCP insider. He used his own company, Mark Surrogacy Investment LLC, to arrange surrogacies across multiple states. In total, 21 children were linked to him. The Wall Street Journal recently ran a story about another Chinese executive who is said to have over 100 children via surrogacy.

Schweizer added,

These cases highlight a largely unregulated surrogacy industry in states like California, where over 100 companies with “surrogacy” in their names are owned by Chinese individuals. IVF and surrogacy services for Chinese clients have even been tied to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Schweizer’s central point was that birth tourism and related surrogacy practices are not just immigration loopholes, but a potentially serious long-term national security threat that allows people with no lived connection or demonstrated allegiance to the United States to obtain the full benefits of American citizenship.  Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) urged Attorney General Pam Bondi in a Feb. 26 letter to investigate Chinese-owned surrogacy centers and related allegations involving exploitation of U.S. surrogacy and birthright citizenship laws.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

 

Influx of foreign truck drivers have caused numerous accidents with serious consequences.

 

Deadly Immigrant ‘Chameleon Carriers’

Michael Swartz patriotpost.us 2-10-26

Fraud is rampant for commercial driver’s licenses, and illegal aliens are causing increasingly frequent traffic accidents and deaths.

The influx of foreign drivers into our trucking industry has been in the news several times in recent months because they’re killing other drivers.

Last August, three members of a Florida family were killed on the Florida Turnpike when a tractor-trailer driven by an illegal immigrant from India made an illegal U-turn in front of them.

Two months later, in California, there was more carnage when another illegal immigrant driver from India plowed through a line of stopped traffic, killing three.

Most recently, four Amish men in Indiana perished when a tractor-trailer driven by an illegal immigrant from Kyrgyzstan swerved across a rural highway and struck the van they were riding in head-on.

Reportedly, the truck driver was on that two-lane rural highway to avoid law enforcement. “That stretch of country road, as lonely as it is, has apparently turned into a trucking super route, with semis continually moving through there at significant speeds,” details Hot Air’s Beege Welborn. “It would make you wonder why, when there are interstates all around that would obviously be more direct and faster. Or so you think until you keep reading and hit an explanation that also had to do with yet another accident with basically the same players. There’s a weigh station on the interstate that many of these truckers are attempting to avoid.” In this case, driver Bekzhan Beishekeev was held after the accident on a bench warrant that turned out to be an ICE detainer.

It seems that truck driving has become a lucrative pipeline for bringing in illegal immigrants and putting them to work hauling tons of freight for peanuts, undercutting legitimate operators and putting them out of business. These so-called “chameleon carriers” incorporate under multiple names, as FreightWaves writer Rob Carpenter describes:

A chameleon carrier operation is about concealment. It’s about constructing a network of entities designed to evade regulatory detection and enforcement. The connective tissue can be any combination of shared Vehicle Identification Numbers moving between authorities, common officers or registered agents across multiple DOT numbers, identical or overlapping phone numbers and email addresses, the same branding and logos regardless of which company name appears on the door, common insurance brokers and policies, shared Electronic Logging Device infrastructure, overlapping financial services and accounting providers, coordinated recruitment pipelines from the same geographic origin, sequential authority registrations suggesting pre-planned entity creation, and shared terminal facilities where multiple authorities operate from the same physical location.

It’s like the Quality Learing Center for truck drivers.

In the case of Beishekeev, the carrier he was driving for was one among a web of entities based at a single address, with intertwined equipment and a small group of officers, all hailing from Kyrgyzstan. Allegedly, trucks were equipped with magnetic signs that allowed the listed company name and DOT identification number to be easily changed.

After the Florida tragedy last summer, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy initiated a compliance crackdown on operators who could not speak English and the CDL training schools from which they “graduated.” In all, 11,500 drivers who couldn’t pass English proficiency tests have been pulled off the road, and nearly half of the 16,000 CDL training schools have been closed for failing to meet standards of readiness first enacted in 2022. Many of these were already inactive, while the remainder could not prove compliance and were shuttered.

“This administration is cracking down on every link in the illegal trucking chain. Under Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, bad actors were able to game the system and let unqualified drivers flood our roadways. Their negligence endangered every family on America’s roadways, and it ends today,” said Duffy in a release. “Under President Trump, we are reigning in illegal and reckless practices that let poorly trained drivers get behind the wheel of semi-trucks and school buses.”

In addition to the requested compliance on training and the attempt to pull drivers who don’t speak English off the road, electronic logging devices have come under scrutiny as well.

Only one state has failed to honor Duffy’s request to help get non-English-speaking truck drivers off the road: California. This meant the Golden State lost $40 million of green as the federal government permanently revoked a share of its federal transportation funding, despite the state announcing it would begin complying in December.

While enforcement helps clean up the roads, it’s a difficult job. As Brandon Harnish, a local county councilman in Indiana, pointed out on X, “An Amish family is shattered. A wife and mother lost her husband and her boys. Why? Because some wealthy foreign national launched a scam trucking company and put an illegal immigrant with a fraudulent CDL on Indiana’s roads. Foreigners get rich and Hoosiers pay for it in blood.”

Nearly everything in this vast nation of ours moves by truck at some point, so it’s important that drivers maintain the ability to safely share the road with the rest of us. Secretary Duffy appears to be doing his part while opening opportunities for drivers who are doing things the correct way, whether native-born or not. But we still have a long way to go, leaving too much of a risk that a chameleon may be careening down the highway next to you.

 

The major reason is because of their acceptance of the illegal alien invasion during the Biden administration.

 

There can no longer be any doubt -- the Democrat party is anti-American to its core

It's one outrage after another with this party.

Patricia McCarthy | March 15, 2026 www.americanthinker.com

Not only is the Democrat party anti-American, but it is also shot through with an anti-democratic streak that is ever more apparent.  

Like every tyranny throughout history -- communist, Marxist, socialist -- citizens are disarmed.  

After every gun crime here, as with the murder of a professor at Old Dominion University the other day, the Muslim murderer, who was previously charged with a terrorism crime and went to prison, is not blamed; his acquisition of the gun is. If the Iranian citizenry were armed, they would not be sitting ducks today. 

The Democrat party is fervently in favor of the gender mutilation of persons suffering from gender dysphoria, including even minors. They know that the drugs and genital surgeries that these people believe they need render them permanent medical patients who will never have children nor have a normal sex life. Still, they are adamantly in favor of the state paying for such drugs and surgeries.  

This is as malevolent as can be imagined.  They just as passionately support forcing girls and women in sports to play against boys and men who identify as females.  Obviously, this puts those girls and women in danger, and more than a few have been seriously injured. 

This Democrat party actively promotes transgenderism and pro-LGBT policies as opposed to marriage and the nuclear family.  They oppose all references to Christianity, especially pro-life messaging.  This has happened over decades of their creeping red/green alliance – progressivism/communism that has eventually joined up with the goals of Islam for entirely different reasons.

No one can deny the horrific damage the maybe-engineered COVID pandemic did to the country.  

Was it conceived by leftists to stop Trump in his tracks, to mandate a vaccine that has caused millions of deaths and injuries?  With people like Bill Gates, Anthony Fauci, Ralph Baric, and the entire Democrat party that set out to destroy anyone who spoke out against the vaccine or the lockdowns, it is not difficult to connect a few dots.  The lockdowns caused a drastic downturn in education that has yet to rebound.  The K–12 kids who suffered Zoom classes and mask mandates have not recovered educationally and may never reach the reading and math scores of pre-COVID students. It grossly damaged the economy, resulting in the shutdown of countless establishments that made cities livable. And it opened the door to the massive fraud that we see all over the country today.

Of all the Democrats’ betrayal of our nation, though, the worst has been their support for Biden’s open borders that invited some twenty-plus million of migrants from all over the world to invade the U.S. without regard for who they were – criminals, mentally ill, people infected with any number of diseases long eradicated here, terrorist-connected, looking for a life of welfare, etc.  

Everyone knows why they support the influx of millions of illegals – to bankroll Democrat-donating NGOs, to ensure that illegals are counted as citizens in our census for additional seats in the House, and to vote.  

Biden’s open border facilitated the trafficking of hundreds of thousands of children who crossed into the country unaccompanied.  That most of them were literally sold into child labor schemes or to pedophilic sex traffickers does not bother the Dems. This is what the Democrat party has become.  The Trump administration has located and recovered about 127,000 of these 300,000 missing children.  

But the bottom line remains.  The Democrats cannot win without cheating.  Since Trump ended the corrupt, money-laundering USAID, conservatives are being elected across Central and South America.  Hmmm.

As of this moment in time, we cannot escape the in-our-faces fact that the Democrats, except for Sen. John Fetterman, and their handmaidens in the media, want Iran to be victorious over the U.S. in the current conflict.  So maniacal is their hatred for President Trump that they are rooting for this war to be a catastrophic defeat for America.  They care not a bit about the plight of the Iranian people; some 7,000 to 50,000 of whom were killed by the regime just a month ago.  

They continue to block funding for the DHS, which includes FEMA.  This is patently evil; there is no other word for the Democrats’ collective wish for our defeat.  

It is more than obvious that the Democrats want whatever chaos could arise with domestic terror attacks by any number of the radical Muslims Biden freely allowed to enter and, in some cases, deliberately imported by the thousands – from Afghanistan, from Somalia, from all over Africa.  They want Americans to suffer; shocking but undeniably true.

Also undeniably true is the fact, proven by their own behavior at President Trump's State of the Union speech, that they value and revere illegal entrants to the country over law-abiding citizens. They demonstrated that and verified it as a united party.  They demonstrated that they do not care about the innocent victims of these alien criminals, such as Laken Riley, many of whose crimes are brutal beyond belief.  They rally behind those here illegally, no matter how vile their crimes.  

What characterizes the Democrat party in 2026 aside from their hatred of President Trump?  Aside from their shocking institutionalized antisemitism, that would be fraud.  Many, many billions of taxpayer dollars have been absconded with, via massive fraud, especially in blue states like Minnesota, Maine, and California. The bureaucracies of blue states essentially underwrite fraud, in many cases benefit from it, for overlooking it.  Democrats do not care about taxpayer dollars, whether it is stolen or spent corruptly, as it has been for decades through NGOs and USAID. 

It should be obvious to every American by now that the very calculated intrusion into our country of millions of Muslims has been a disaster.  Most have no intention of assimilating, even those who are children of naturalized Muslim parents, like the two who tried to surpass the devastation of the Boston Marathon bombing in front of Gracie Mansion in New York City, and the man who tried to blow up the largest synagogue in Michigan.  Islam has won in NYC with the election of Zohran Mamdani.  

Now they want Texas. The Lone Star state is Islam’s particular target; they are building their Epic City, a Muslim-only community complete with Sharia law.  They want our textbooks to be rewritten, our school boards to submit to their demands, our grocery stores to accommodate their dietary rules, and our churches to become mosques as they have throughout the U.K.

Part of the Democrats’ support of illegal alien criminals is their simultaneous support of releasing violent criminals onto the streets of American cities to continue their penchant for criminal behavior.  Soros-funded DAs and judges all over the country are purposely allowing violent actors to be free to visit further violence upon American citizens, including children.  As long predicted, our nation can only be defeated from within, and the Democrats have become our “barbarians within our gates.”  It is a cosmic sign that the one Democrat with the courage to vote with the Republicans on the most important issues, like the SAVE America Act, is the man who recovered from a serious stroke and, as he has recovered, is more conservative by the day -- John Fetterman, again. The rest of his party suffers from a collective descent into anti-Americanism and the institutional corruption that has characterized criminal regimes throughout history.

What the Democrat party has become is an American tragedy.  The Founders would be heartbroken.

 

Our Nation's Judiciary is chaotic when Judges rule on politics instead of the law.

 

1st Circuit Halts Rogue Judge’s Bid To Stop Trump’s ‘Third Country’ Deportations

By: Shawn Fleetwood  March 12, 2026 thefederalist.com

In a win for the Trump administration, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a lower court ruling on Wednesday that sought to hinder the government’s deportation operations.

In its short order, the three-judge panel for the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals placed an administrative stay (“pause”) on a recent decision by District Judge Brian Murphy. The Biden appointee issued a ruling last month declaring the administration’s efforts to deport illegal aliens to “third countries” (nations other than the individual’s country-of-origin) to be unlawful and blocked its enforcement.

The 1st Circuit panel of two Biden appointees and a Bush 43 appointee determined “[a]fter careful review” that an administrative stay temporarily pausing Murphy’s order “is appropriate.” The judges further indicated their intent to “promptly” issue a complete ruling on revoking the lower court’s blockade.

The appellate court’s decision authorizes the Trump administration to move forward with its deportation policy as litigation on the matter continues.

Wednesday’s ruling comes as another humiliating moment for Murphy, who has a history of openly defying the U.S. Supreme Court on the matter.

The nation’s highest court temporarily stayed (6-3) a preliminary injunction issued by Murphy last year on the administration’s “third country” deportations. Not to be outdone, the Biden appointee issued a directive to the federal government hours later, in which he claimed that his initial block on the policy was not affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

The Trump administration subsequently asked the Supreme Court to clarify its order. This time, in a 7-2 decision, the high court affirmed that its ruling did, in fact, cover Murphy’s initial injunction.

The incident prompted stinging criticisms from Associate Justice Elena Kagan. In a statement concurring with the high court’s clarification, the Obama appointee noted that while she disagreed with the Supreme Court’s initial decision to block Murphy’s injunction, she does “not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed.”

The legal battle over the Trump administration’s deportation policies is one of many playing out in federal courtrooms across America, as left-wing activists wage a full-throated judicial coup against the sitting president.

Filing lawsuits in district courts dominated by Democrat-appointed judges, these leftists have sought to weaponize the legal system to grind the administration’s policy agenda to a halt. And in many cases, these rogue judges have played along with such a strategy.

Just last week, a three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals shot down a request by the government to freeze a lower court blockade on its revocation of Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals residing in the United States. The Department of Justice appealed the decision to the Supreme Court on Wednesday.