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Project 2025: Abortion policy

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The Supreme Court is a threat to American democracy

Do immigrants have constitutional rights?

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Asylum seekers wait to be processed by border patrol agents at an improvised camp near the U.S.-Mexico border in Jacumba Hot Springs, Calif.

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Sue Bin Park, Oklahoma Watch
By Sue Bin Park, Oklahoma WatchJun 06, 2024
Sue Bin Park, Oklahoma Watch
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This fact brief was originally published by Oklahoma Watch. Read the original here. Fact briefs are published by newsrooms in the Gigafact network, and republished by The Fulcrum. Visit Gigafact to learn more.

Do immigrants have constitutional rights?

Yes.

All immigrants, documented or undocumented, are guaranteed certain constitutional rights. Basic rights such as freedom of speech, due process, and the right to a jury trial are granted on the basis of personhood, not citizenship.

The Supreme Court has gradually established that many constitutional protections apply to all people residing in the U.S. on the basis of legal language specifying persons, rather than citizens, in the Bill of Rights. Other rulings, such as Plyler v. Doe (1982), affirmed that undocumented immigrants are also viewed as persons in the eyes of Constitutional law.

In practice, laws vary widely, such as the expedited removal process enacted in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. Under this law, undocumented immigrants who have lived less than two years in the U.S. and are arrested within 100 miles of the border can be deported without a court hearing.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

Sources

Constitution Annotated ArtI.S8.C18.8.7.2 Aliens in the United

StatesNational Archives The Bill of Rights: A Transcription

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Preamble to the U.S. Constitution
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We can’t amend 'We the People' but 'we' do need a constitutional reboot

LaRue writes at Structure Matters. He is former deputy director of the Eisenhower Institute and of the American Society of International Law.

The following article was accepted for publication prior to the attempted assassination attempt of Donald Trump. Both the author and the editors determined no changes were necessary.

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Project 2025: A C-SPAN interview

Beau Breslin, a regular contributor to The Fulcrum, was recently interviewed on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal” about Project 2025.

Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.” He writes “A Republic, if we can keep it,” a Fulcrum series to assist American citizens on the bumpy road ahead this election year. By highlighting components, principles and stories of the Constitution, Breslin hopes to remind us that the American political experiment remains, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, the “most interesting in the world.”

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People protest outside the Supreme Court as the justices prepared to hear Grants Pass v. Johnson on April 22.

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High court upholds law criminalizing homelessness, making things worse

Herring is an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, co-author of an amicus brief in Johnson v. Grants Pass and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.

In late June, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass that the government can criminalize homelessness. In the court’s 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the conservative justices ruled that bans on sleeping in public when there are no shelter beds available do not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

This ruling will only make homelessness worse. It may also propel U.S. localities into a “race to the bottom” in passing increasingly punitive policies aimed at locking up or banishing the unhoused.

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Republican House members hold a press event to highlight the introduction in 2023.

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Project 2025: A federal Parents' Bill of Rights

Biffle is a podcast host and contributor at BillTrack50.

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for a second Trump administration, includes an outline for a Parents' Bill of Rights, cementing parental considerations as a “top tier” right.

The proposal calls for passing legislation to ensure families have a "fair hearing in court when the federal government enforces policies that undermine their rights to raise, educate, and care for their children." Further, “the law would require the government to satisfy ‘strict scrutiny’ — the highest standard of judicial review — when the government infringes parental rights.”

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Breslin is the Joseph C. Palamountain Jr. Chair of Political Science at Skidmore College and author of “A Constitution for the Living: Imagining How Five Generations of Americans Would Rewrite the Nation’s Fundamental Law.”

This is part of a series offering a nonpartisan counter to Project 2025, a conservative guideline to reforming government and policymaking during the first 180 days of a second Trump administration. The Fulcrum's cross partisan analysis of Project 2025 relies on unbiased critical thinking, reexamines outdated assumptions, and uses reason, scientific evidence, and data in analyzing and critiquing Project 2025.

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