DES MOINES, Iowa — Donald Trump, the chief propagator of false “birther” claims first against then-President Barack Obama and later against Sen. Ted Cruz, has a new target: Nikki Haley.
As Haley surges in New Hampshire polling, Trump posted an article on his Truth Social account from a right-wing outlet that claimed Haley, his GOP rival, is ineligible to be president because her parents were not U.S. citizens when she was born.
Haley was born in South Carolina and has lived in the U.S. her entire life. Her parents were immigrants, who became citizens after her birth in 1972.
“The birther claims against Nikki Haley are totally baseless as a legal and constitutional matter,” Harvard Law School professor emeritus Laurence Tribe wrote in an email. “I can’t imagine what Trump hopes to gain by those claims unless it’s to play the race card against the former governor and UN ambassador as a woman of color — and to draw on the wellsprings of anti-immigrant prejudice by reminding everyone that Haley’s parents weren’t citizens when she was born in the USA.”
The 14th Amendment clearly states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens. It was enacted after the Civil War to confer citizenship upon Black Americans who had previously been slaves.
“Someone should tell him [Trump] that the North won” the Civil War, joked Burt Neuborne, a professor emeritus at New York University Law School and the founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice.
“If you’re born in the United States, the whole purpose of the 14th Amendment was to make you a citizen,” he added.
To be eligible for the presidency, a person must be a “natural born citizen” and at least 35 years old and must have resided in the country for at least 14 years.
Trump has argued that “birthright citizenship” should be taken away for the children of undocumented immigrants.
The Trump campaign, asked about his social media post,…
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