CNN reported on oral arguments at the US Supreme Court, in a case challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to curtail ‘birthright citizenship’.
Reprieve submitted an amicus brief in the case, also signed by the Institute of Race Relations and a group of immigration law specialists. The brief set out the “messy” consequences when the UK ended birthright citizenship, including the Windrush scandal and the children of settled EU migrants suddenly losing their entitlement to a British passport.
When Britain changed the rules in 1983, tens of thousands of people born here but lacking the documents to prove it found their UK citizenship at risk. They faced being deported from the country they had lived in their whole lives – often to a country they had never even visited.
At the Supreme Court, a justice asked how things might get “messy” if birthright citizenship is limited. As our brief explained, the answer is very “messy” indeed.
