Two Pregnant Asylum-Seekers In Neighboring States Face Different Birthright Citizenship Challenges

Two pregnant women, one in North Carolina and one in South Carolina, face potentially fractured paths for their babies after the Supreme Court limited judges’ ability to issue nationwide orders blocking the Trump administration’s plan to end birthright citizenship.

Zain Lakhani, the director of migrant rights and justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, said that if the order is allowed to go into effect in late July, “that creates not only just an enormous amount of chaos and fear and confusion for immigrant women themselves, but it also creates an enormous amount of confusion and chaos for hospital systems and for state administrators.”

“Just administratively, how to sort of manage this enormous amount of fracturing is a really considerable problem that we’re just not really prepared to have to operationalize, because that is not how constitutional laws and how our laws work,” she said.

Lakhani said another significant issue that implementing the order would raise is the creation of “a substantial statelessness problem.”