Birthright citizenship: 'They were born here. This is their country,' says LI mother of two who traveled to Washington, D.C. for Supreme Court hearing 

Erlin, a Long Island immigrant mother of two, cast her fears aside to attend a rally Thursday morning outside the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. as justices considered whether to keep a nationwide block on a presidential order that seeks to restrict birthright citizenship.

Erlin, 49, who was born in Honduras and has applied for legal status, traveled to Washington to stand against President Donald Trump's executive order that would deny citizenship to children born on American soil whose parents are in the country illegally or temporarily. She spoke to Newsday on the condition her last name not be used to protect her family's privacy.

Birthright citizenship is established in the constitution’s 14th Amendment, but the Trump administration wants to limit who is entitled to that right. Various entities have sued the administration seeking to halt the executive order resulting in a nationwide, or universal, injunction that was being challenged by the administration Thursday.

Erlin was worried that restricting citizenship would have devastating consequences for countless people, including potentially for her American-born children, one of whom attends high school and another who is working and is in his early 20s.

"They visited Honduras when they were two years old. What would they do if they were sent back? They were born here. This is their country, this is their culture," Erlin said in a phone interview Thursday. "What they’re doing isn’t right to people born here," she added. A member of the advocacy group Make the Road New York, she joined dozens of New York protesters Thursday, some of whom were seen waving American flags and signs.

The demonstration kicked off as Supreme Court justices heard arguments by the Trump Administration on whether the order can remain paused nationwide amid ongoing litigation.

The case was being closely monitored by many legal scholars and experts, including on Long Island, some of whom told Newsday that a win for the administration at this point would set a dangerous precedent for the country.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in court that since Jan. 20, 40 universal injunctions have been issued against the federal government. Any injunctions should only apply to the parties suing, not to the entire nation, he argued.

"I think what we have are lower courts making snap judgments on the merits that ignore the fundamental principle of the 14th Amendment that it was about giving citizenship to the children of slaves, not to the children of illegal immigrants," Sauer told the court Thursday about the injunction.

New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, who is representing 22 states that sued, told the justices that having a patchwork interpretation of the 14th amendment, even temporarily, "puts chaos on the ground where people's citizenship turns on and off when you cross state lines."

James Sample, a law professor at Hofstra University focused on constitutional law and democracy, said in a phone interview Thursday that lifting the nationwide pause would be "problematic," regardless of one's political affiliation. 

"If the government's position at oral argument today in the Supreme Court were to prevail, the Constitution would mean different things in different places for different people. That is a fundamentally un-American concept. It is dangerous, and it could well result in replacing the rule of law with the rule of executive fiat," said Sample.

"Whether one is a conservative or a liberal, a Democrat or a Republican, the position being advanced by the government today would result in a massive transfer of power away from Congress, away from the courts and to the executive," he added.

Alexander Holtzman, an attorney who teaches at Hofstra University, also echoed those concerns, adding the conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch appeared interested in the concept of class action lawsuits as an "alternative to nationwide injunctions, which I wonder if that's going to be the direction a majority of the court ultimately considers," he said.

"When something is clearly unlawful and unconstitutional, to not be able to get that policy enjoined nationwide, but rather only a kind of a piecemeal approach ... I think is indeed dangerous," he added.

Nancy Hiemstra an associate professor at Stony Brook University whose research focuses on U.S. immigration enforcement policies, said that the principles this country was founded on are at stake. She said limiting the power of the courts would result in a power imbalance and grant more power to the executive branch.

"It greatly destabilizes the mechanisms we have for how our democracy is supposed to work," Hiemstra said. Limiting birthright citizenship in some areas would result in a myriad of issues, she said.

"It would just open up a quagmire. ... there will be all these babies born in these areas where it was allowed to go into effect that essentially have no record of their birth in terms of citizenship. So what does that do? Does that mean they go to a different state and then they would be granted citizenship," she said.

Paige Austin, supervising litigation attorney at Make the Road New York, which is one of the organizations suing the government to stop the order but was not involved in Thursday's case, said the idea of restricting citizenship is sowing fear and confusion among immigrant communities. 

"It's imposing a tremendous stress on families and should the executive order take effect, the impact would be enormous and egregious for families, for children ... so we are hopeful that it doesn't happen, but certainly it is a cause of tremendous concern," Austin said.