Stephen Miller, the far-right White House adviser responsible for many of President Donald Trump's most controversial and unpopular crackdowns on immigrants, has a new proposal to attack a 40-year-old Supreme Court civil rights ruling — and a prominent legal expert warned the consequences could be dire.
Reports this week indicated that Miller met with Republican lawmakers in Texas and pressed them to draft legislation that would exclude the children of unauthorized immigrants from access to public schools. This would be a direct challenge to the landmark 1982 Plyler v. Doe ruling, in which the Supreme Court ruled that all children have the right to education regardless of their parents' legal status.
If Texas Republicans went through with this, and the federal courts overturned Plyler to allow it, the impact would be to create a separate and lesser category of citizenship for certain children born in the United States, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick warned on X.
"The inevitable result of this would be the creation of a permanent underclass of exploitable people, who grew up in this country, know no other, and have no education so are more vulnerable than ever before; a serf class for the rich and powerful," he wrote.
This comes at the same time the Trump administration is trying to erase the 14th Amendment's underlying guarantee of citizenship to all people born in the United States via executive order. Under this order, the children of many noncitizen parents, even some who are here legally, would not be eligible for federal documents that affirm citizenship, like passports.
The Supreme Court is set to hear a challenge to that order early next month.