The Criminal's new anti-immigrant policies will include hate crimes targeting children

We're now seeing the first specifics of how The Criminal and The Criminal's associated minions, who appear to have qualified for their jobs through either sex crimes, public swindling, or being on whatever TV channel The Criminal happened to be watching, intend to run their new administration. They intend to be incredibly cruel and, at the same time, magnificently stupid; in other words, the whole government will be restructured to mirror the personality of the felon running it.

A neo-Nazi and white supremacist fever dream for a long, long time now has been the revocation of birthright citizenship, the constitutional provision that asserts that anyone born on American soil is an American citizen from birth and has all the rights any other citizen would have. The reason it's a fever dream and not a plausible outcome—at least, not under our normal rule of law—is because birthright citizenship was written into the Constitution after the Civil War to block the war's racist losers from claiming that even if slavery had been outlawed, the people they still wanted to oppress were still not "real" Americans and could therefore still be exploited, imprisoned, or killed at will. The provision protected immigrant families from similar race-minded exploitation; authorities are not allowed to deprive children of rights under the claim that no, no, bloodlines say that this newborn child is in fact a German citizen, or Italian, or Irish, or Norwegian, or "a Jew"—and therefore not really "American."

None of that nonsense: If someone is born on American soil they're an American. They can't be deported somewhere else. They can't be imprisoned for not having proper paperwork when coming out of the womb. It was written into the 14th Amendment, the same amendment that specified that those who attempt to overthrow an American government are disqualified from future service in government, and adopted into law with the unwritten addendum of Screw you, racist losers, and go be racist losers somewhere else.

White people who tattoo racist symbols on their arms have been fuming about that one since the day it happened. The pseudointellectual wing of their movement have spent over a century inventing new theories as to why it doesn't count on a Tuesday, or if the moon is waning, or if a child's parents come from a country white people with racist tattoos really, really don't like. It's never worked; the courts have held that the text of the 14th Amendment is clear, its context is clear, the intent of its authors and ratifiers was clear, and it's settled law.

How, then, do The Criminal's underlings say they will overturn part of the Constitution itself? Well, they're incredibly cruel and immeasurably stupid, so the grand plan is "Trump will sign an executive order that says the 14th Amendment doesn't count." From Vox:

Ending birthright citizenship has been on President-elect Donald Trump’s wish list for years, and he’s pledged to kill it once and for all in his next term. But ending it may not be as easy as he’s promised. 

Under a longstanding interpretation of the Constitution and federal law, children born in the US automatically become American citizens, even if their parents are undocumented. Trump, however, has promised that, “On day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the children of illegal immigrants will not receive automatic US citizenship.”

Specifically, that executive order would mandate that at least one parent must be a US citizen or green card holder for their child to qualify for automatic citizenship. Federal agencies would be directed to deny passports, Social Security numbers, and public benefits to children with two undocumented parents.

Please keep in mind that no matter how stupid that sounds, announcing staggeringly stupid things is the hallmark of every fascist movement. The point isn't whether something is legal or not legal, the point is for Dear Leader to announce a very stupid thing and then anyone smart enough to point out how stupid it is gets marked as an enemy of the state. Fascism is the grand merging, Wonder Twins style, of the Cruel and the Stupid. I really think Robert Paxton could have simplified most of his work down to that one sentence, but historians have a habit of being fussy about these things.

The key part of the "executive order" is this:

Federal agencies would be directed to deny passports, Social Security numbers, and public benefits to children with two undocumented parents.

Okay, well, that's not how that works. Federal agencies don't get to decide which parts of the Constitution are followed and which aren't—in fact, our Cruel and Stupid Supreme Court majority has been spending a good deal of effort insisting that Federal agencies aren't allowed to make any decisions about anything unless Congress has specifically passed legislation detailing what to do in that particular sub-sub-situation.

But more to the point, the grand plan The Criminal's subordinates have come up with to block children having the civil rights of every other American is: Refuse to hand over the paperwork. Take that, newborn babies, The Criminal's government will simply refuse to acknowledge that you exist.

You can get all the necessary swears out of your system now, we'll wait. When you're done telling Stephen Miller and the rest of The Criminal's white nationalist psychopaths where they can go and how they can get there, the important bit here is that nowhere, in the damn Constitution, does it say that a human being's citizenship depends on having a Social Security card. Or passport.

It don't work that way, and not even The Criminal's minions truly believe it does. The point is that not even The Criminal can end birthright citizenship, no matter what horseshit he ladles onto White House stationary, and so the grand "plan" is to withhold the rights those American citizens legally have and dare anyone to do anything about it.

Which is not, as it turns out, an unusual plan at all. It's the same plan that racist state and local governments have enacted on their own citizens with regularity, and the reason the federal government has had to repeatedly step in to monitor, file suit against, and occasionally call in the National Guard over.

Nobody in The Criminal's goon squad is breaking any new ground here. Stephen Miller isn't doing anything that the Klan wasn't doing long before he was born: Sure, the laws say certain people have the same civil and human rights as anyone else. So "the plan" is to deny those rights anyway, and to put the targets in a situation where resistance is either dangerous or futile.

The entire conservative movement has wracked their brains to come up with a plan identical to those used by every racist southern sheriff of the last century. Funny how that works.

As many, many people have pointed out, this "plan" is plainly illegal. Since it targets undocumented parents, who are among the most vulnerable people in the nation, the scheme is to deny newborn children paperwork, then dare their parents to try to fix that. Many won't, presuming that speaking up will put them at the top of the list for the "militarized" deportation camps The Criminal is pledging. A whole lot of lawyers in this country, however, are about to get a whole lot of easy-layup cases suing the federal government on behalf of American children being targeted by Dear Leader's racist minions.

It will be a race: Can a fascist, lawbreaking government round up and deport babies before lawyers can stop them from doing it. Whether it's illegal or not won't matter if the children get deported without paperwork and have no way of proving to racist chucklefks that they are, in fact, who they say they are.

If there is one unknown in all of this, it is how far the plainly Cruel and Stupid Supreme Court majority will go in their own efforts to be accomplices to the crime. Court watchers continue to insist that the odds the Court has the votes to undermine the 14th Amendment remains very low, thanks to a few of the swing votes still wanting to at least pretend at having a bit of dignity; that doesn't mean the Court's own fascists couldn't slow-walk the cases to allow the crimes to continue as long as possible before stepping in. It's also a bit riling to claim that a Supreme Court that just nixed the part of the 14th Amendment barring seditionists from government wouldn't "dare" nix all the rest of it with the same vigor, especially after its Chief Justice burped up a plainly fascist ruling declaring from here on in, presidents are allowed to commit and order crimes with impunity so long as they say they're officially Presidenting when doing it.

The core of The Criminal Administration's plan isn't a plan to overturn the 14th Amendment and strip the citizenship of American-born children. The text of the plan is to do crimes, crimes not much different from those carried out by racist deep south governors or Klan-allied law enforcement officers. They plan to willfully violate the civil rights of those children, deny them services, deny them identifying papers, and "deport" as many as possible even though the children are American citizens, daring the courts and the lawyers and the Constitution to do a damn thing about it.

It's not clever. They're just corrupt racists willing to commit hate crimes.