The court cited comments by Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio on the Civil Rights Bill of 1866, precursor to the Fourteenth Amendment, identifying the need to safeguard the rights of the “alien and stranger” alongside those of “freedmen”—otherwise the bill would condone by other means the very evils that Congress sought to eliminate.706 Bingham went on to serve as the main author of the Fourteenth Amendment; Justice Hugo Black referred to him as “the Madison” of the Fourteenth Amendment.707 Justice William Brennan, the author of the note in Plyler, participated in virtually every major expatriation and denaturalization case that shaped modern jurisprudence regarding the first clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.708 Not once throughout the Supreme Court’s decades-long debate over the application of these powers did a single justice raise the possibility that “the words ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof ’ might possibly limit the protections afforded by the citizenship clause to the children of undocumented immigrants.”709 Politicized Birthright Citizenship A detailed review of Wong Kim Ark’s immigration file and those of his children reveals “how flexible the Immigration Bureau’s documents requirements could be in the face of concerns about fraud.”710 This broad government discretion holds true in our time, as the cases of Mexican-Americans at the southern border, Yemeni-Americans trapped in Sana’a, and U.S. citizens detained under Secure Communities and similar immigration enforcement programs today readily illustrate. Officials are empowered to set aside even the most sophisticated biometric identification tools available to them, and make life-altering decisions on the basis of appearance alone, when a fraud directive or arbitrary personal hunch overwrites a supposedly uniform and rules-based regime. In the Dominican Republic (as explored in the Comparative Case Studies of Chapter I), racial animus against the Haitian minority has become embedded in the day-to-day bureaucracy of citizenship, rendering the question of jus soli citizenship increasingly unsettled and the need for reinterpretation gradually more palatable to a wider swath of the public. The introduction of an ethnicity-based citizenship in the Dominican Republic served the interests of a nativist political class, and ultimately transformed Dominican citizens of Haitian descent into deportable aliens. The measures and rhetoric unfolding in the U.S. today track, to some extent, the political strategy deployed in the Dominican Republic. In both the Dominican Republic and the United States, there is a strategic and wide-ranging effort to render citizenship “unsettled,”711 in an atmosphere of heightened, state-sanctioned antipathy toward migrants and minorities. IV. Political attacks on citizenship by birth in the united states 157