Join BLMP for a webinar discussing these attacks at 3pm PT/5pm CT/6pm ET on Tuesday, October 30: http://bit.ly/BLMPTRANS
(Washington, D.C.) In an interview for Axios on HBO, President Donald Trump announced his plans to end birthright citizenship through an executive order. Progressive legal organizations swiftly responded to the news by promising to challenge these xenophobic attacks in the courts.
Alan Peleaz Lopez, a member of the Black LGBTQ+ Migrant Project Steering Committee, issued the following statement:
“Election tactic or not, the fact that the Trump administration is publicly considering an executive order targeting birthright citizenship has chilling consequences.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the denial of citizenship targeting specific communities. African descendants were enslaved in the United States for 249 years before they were granted citizenship in 1868, and this citizenship didn’t even grant African Americans the right to vote. Native American communities were not considered citizens until 1924, which was only 94 years ago. President Trump’s executive order would not only have long-lasting negative impacts on immigrant communities, but it will also resurface the traumas that African American and Native American communities in the U.S. lived through during slavery, the Assimilation era, and Jim Crow.
Today’s news of a potential executive order targeting birthright citizenship is the third attack that directly impacts Black LGBTQIA+ migrants in the time-span of one week. These recent events let us know that U.S. society does not support or want Black LGBTQIA+ migrants in the country. Just last week, the New York Times obtained a memo by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that would define gender as immutable. The erasure of transgender and gender nonconforming lives affects all immigrants, including transgender and gender-nonconforming asylum-seekers and refugees. Lastly, the murder of two Black elders in Kentucky, now being investigated as a hate crime, is representative of the heightened anti-Black racism that we are experiencing under the Trump administration.
For some of us, the fight back against this hate will happen in the courts. But now is the time for all of us to commit to vigilantly supporting and protecting each other. Whether that means we vote with our values, we organize in our communities, or we rally and march to publicly show our support, all of our actions matter.”