Can someone please use this as a test case to end birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment?
The better examples of that are birth tourists, people who fly in, drop the baby and leave. Or Mexicans who have children in the US and promptly return home, a major issue draining hospitals on the border.
The easy grounds for excluding her would be that her father was the Yemeni ambassador at the time, if in fact that were true. Under the Law of Nations and the Natural Law, such individuals have NEVER been considered members of the polity in the country to which their parent was the ambassador, but rather citizens of the country OF WHICH their parent was an ambassador.
Now, as far as I recall, things get murky pretty fast when the parent in question is not a bona fide foreign ambassador, but is some kind of lesser official, such as a high level “diplomat” who is nevertheless not the ambassador, or who, though their country’s highest official here present, is formally or technically speaking not AN ambassador. The U.S. government really cannot be heard to claim that such children are U.S. citizens (e.g. for purposes of Selective Service Registration/wartime draft), since to do so would be considered undiplomatic in the extreme. Nevertheless purist interpretations of the 14th Amendment would seem to suggest that the U.S. government could make a straight-faced claim in favor of citizenship for such individuals if it were inclined to do so, based on non-ambassador parentage and birth in the United States of America. This is the kind of pretzel logic we invite into our system when we fail to put appropriate limits on so-called “born citizenship” for individuals, neither of whose parents were U.S. citizens at the time of their birth. It never was a workable theory but we seemed to have slipped so far into that way of thinking over the years that U.S. officials are now loathe to begin propounding any contrary theories.
I’d wager that eventually the U.S. will relent and stop arguing against U.S. citizenship in this woman’s case.
By the way, if she manages to weasel her way back into the United States and is formally recognized as a U.S. citizen, one would have to admit that in accordance with a similar line of reasoning, John Sidney McCain III was a born and lifelong citizen of Panama. Not for nothing, but also not that this should make a difference, but McCain was NOT born on a U.S. military facility within the confines of the Panama Canal Zone. There WAS a medical facility on base at that time but it was NOT equipped with a maternity ward. Accordingly, John Sidney McCain, III was born in Colon Hospital, Colon, Panama to two U.S. citizens, one of which was a U.S. Navy Admiral. Sort of the same level of official as a “diplomat”, wouldn’t you say?
The Constitution specifically excludes children born in the USA to foreign diplomats.
It was the Obama Administration early in 2016 that sent her a letter explaining her lack of citizenship. Leftists saying this is a Trump decision are simply lying.
It’s not even a hard case.