'Cruel, Unfair and Racist': Black immigrants whose fathers
are U.S. citizens push to overturn law that keeps them from obtaining
citizenship

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Liz Vinson | Read the full piece here

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Friend,

Behind the steel gates of a remote immigrant prison in Georgia lies a
visitation room where detained people speak to visitors through a
plexiglass window. There are messages etched on the visitor's
side - words the detained men and women sitting opposite
can't see.

"Be anxious for nothing," one message reads.
"I'm sorry," "Jesus," and "No
Borders" read others. They're messages of hope - a
feeling lost for many Black people who are detained at the Stewart
Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.

The message with the most power, however, is in Spanish, and it speaks
volumes: "Sí, se puede." The English translation:
Yes, it's possible. Yes, you can.

But this message is pierced with doubt, as people at Stewart and in
other immigrant detention facilities across the country fight an
uphill legal battle for their release.

Kelvin Silva - one of many Black men held at Stewart - is
facing deportation because of an archaic and racially inequitable law
known as the Guyer Rule that prevented him from becoming a U.S.
citizen as a child, even though his father was a naturalized U.S.
citizen. Were it not for the Guyer Rule, Silva - who was born in
the Dominican Republic but grew up in the United States - would
have automatically gained citizenship when he was just 11 years old.

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Enacted in 1940, the Guyer Rule prevented U.S.-citizen fathers, but
not U.S.-citizen mothers, from passing their citizenship status to
foreign-born, nonmarital children - in other words, children who
were born "out of wedlock." The rule disproportionately
restricted how nonwhite parents could secure citizenship for their
children - and for decades was maintained for just that reason.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and its co-counsel are representing
Silva in a federal court challenge that claims the Guyer Rule is
unconstitutional because it discriminates based on gender and race.

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"The Guyer Rule exemplifies the same type of anti-father
discrimination that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional in
Sessions v. Morales-Santana in 2017," said Meredyth Yoon, a lead
attorney with the SPLC's Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative,
which is representing Silva. "And although the law Mr. Silva is
challenging makes no explicit mention of race, historical records show
the Guyer Rule has an unequivocally racially discriminatory purpose,
and it has had a disproportionate impact on Black immigrants, not to
mention the profound harm it has inflicted on generations to
come."

The racist Guyer Rule originates from an 1864 Maryland court decision,
Guyer v. Smith, in which the court ruled that two sons born overseas
of a white U.S.-citizen father and a Black mother from St.
Barthélemy were "not born in lawful wedlock" and
thus were not U.S. citizens. The Guyer Rule was subsequently
incorporated into federal nationality laws, first through
administrators' policies and practices, and later by Congress
through the Nationality Act of 1940.

Although Black immigrants were eligible for naturalization starting in
1870, historical and legislative records show that lawmakers
nevertheless worked to limit the number of people of color who could
become U.S. citizens. Across decades when white supremacy, segregation
and eugenics undergirded the entire American legal system,
administrators and legislators accomplished this goal in a variety of
ways, including literacy tests, a racially discriminatory quota system
and immigration preference categories that prioritized the
"marital" family over other forms of familial arrangement,
notably at a time when interracial marriage was illegal in most U.S.
states.
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