Amicus | The Un-American Project

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4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 May 2025

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Whether it’s attempting to overturn birthright citizenship, effectively stripping citizenship from American children, or claiming Alien Enemy Act war powers under an imaginary invasion, Trump’s anti-immigrant moves are outlandishly unconstitutional. They are also being met with significant pushback from judges, even conservative ones. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern who explains the landmark ruling from a Trump-appointed judge in the southern district of Texas that declared the administration's use of the Alien Enemies Act is unlawful. Next, Amanda Frost, University of Virginia law professor and author of You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers, joins Dahlia to explain what Birthright Citizenship really means, and all the ways Trump is working to redefine what it means to be an American, including stripping citizenship from children and denaturalizing adults. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.8	Amazon offers term time working to their employees, like Anton,
0:07.4	who's home to look after his daughters during their holidays.
0:10.0	Hello!
0:10.8	To him, this is the best sound in the world.
0:17.2	Actually, maybe that's the best sound of all.
0:23.1	Now that's term time working.
0:24.5	Offered at Amazon.
0:26.8	Ten weeks off guaranteed per year.
0:29.0	Mix of paid holiday and unpaid time off.
0:29.8	Conditions apply.
0:40.3	I'm Dahlia Lithwick and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.
1:02.3	Every single child born in the United States, if this executive order goes into effect, and that's 3.6 million children a year on average, every single one of those families will now have to scramble to provide documentation and prove the citizenship of their child and themselves in order to get that child recognized as a citizen who has a right to remain in the United States and not be deported from day one of their lives.
1:12.8	If this is embraced by the higher courts, which I think it should be, then it is a really smart workaround to the problem of every single migrant having to find a lawyer and file an individualized habeas petition to avoid getting transferred
1:19.2	to El Salvador.
1:23.7	We are staggering across the finish line of yet another week of an all-out detonation of centuries-old ideas about citizenship and due process and who gets it and who gets to keep it.
1:38.5	At bottom, this administration wants to rewrite not just the Constitution and the law, but the very idea of Americanness.
1:47.2	And it's been the judiciary that has almost universally stood in its way.
1:53.2	In a few minutes, UVA law schools Amanda Frost will explain the contours of the birthright citizenship litigation before the courts up to and including the Supreme Court.
2:04.3	She's also flagging the citizenship stripping endeavors that are already underway.
2:10.8	That conversation connected a whole lot of dots for me this week.
2:14.8	I thought I knew this material pretty well, but man, I learned a ton.
2:20.0	You're going to want to stick around for that. But first, on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Fernando
	...

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