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Column: Meet the architect of Trump's attack on birthright citizenship, a California lawyer facing disbarment
Donald Trump’s flurry of first-day executive orders aimed at remaking American government in his image may have Americans’ heads spinning, but one stands out from the rest for its sheer audacity.
That’s the order to rescind “birthright citizenship,” which is constitutionally granted to almost all children born within the U.S. borders.
Opposition to birthright citizenship emerged almost immediately with its enactment as part of the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868, and has waxed and waned in parallel with political controversies over immigration.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.
— U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment
But its emergence as a core issue for Trump owes much to the work of a California lawyer. He’s John C. Eastman, a longtime Trump advisor who is facing disbarment proceedings due to his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Eastman has advocated a reconsideration of birthright citizenship — or as I wrote in 2020, “flogging this dead horse” — for years. He has consistently been in the minority among legal authorities on the topic.
Still, he maintains, as he did in a recent conversation with me, that “the leading scholars on this issue all agree with me.”
He added: “I’ve probably been most prominent more recently in articulating that position.” He declined to say if he had consulted with the Trump campaign or transition team before Trump issued the executive order.
Eastman’s criticism of birthright citizenship unfurled mostly through legal treatises and in conservative publications until 2020, when an article he wrote for Newsweek made him the public face of the issue.
The article, which appeared the day after Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris as his 2020 running mate, questioned whether Harris was eligible for the office of president (or by extension vice president) because she didn’t meet the constitutional requirement that a president be a “natural born citizen.”
“Her father was (and is) a Jamaican national, her mother was from India, and neither was a naturalized U.S. citizen at the time of Harris’ birth in 1964,” Eastman wrote. “That … makes her not a ‘natural born citizen.’”
Within days, Eastman’s argument was taken up by Trump, who cited him as a “very highly qualified and very talented lawyer.”
Newsweek, however, promptly disavowed Eastman’s article. In an editor’s note, the magazine tried to rebut objections that it had been tied in with the “birther” claims that Barack Obama had not been born in the U.S. Rather, it said, the article was merely airing a legitimate legal debate. Two days later, it posted a second note, in which it stated that “this op-ed is being used by some as a tool to perpetuate racism and xenophobia. We apologize. … We entirely failed to anticipate the ways in which the essay would be interpreted, distorted and weaponized.”
Before examining the persistence of attacks on birthright citizenship, a few words about Eastman. The former dean and law professor at the Fowler School of Law of Orange County-based Chapman University has seen his activities as a lawyer for Trump lead his career down a dark hole.
Eastman played an important role in promoting Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and addressed the crowd at Trump’s Washington rally on Jan. 6, 2021, that led to the attack on the Capitol that day.
A week after that rally, Eastman and Chapman reached an agreement under which he agreed to retire from the university, effective immediately.
In January 2023, the State Bar of California launched disbarment proceedings against Eastman, citing his efforts to promote Trump’s unfounded claim that the election was stolen. After a more than monthlong trial in the state bar court, in a March 27, 2024, ruling, Bar Judge Yvette Roland found Eastman culpable on 10 of the 11 state bar charges and recommended his disbarment.
Eastman “made multiple false and misleading statements in his professional capacity as attorney for President Trump in court filings and other written statements,” Roland ruled.
Under state bar rules, as long as Roland’s disbarment recommendation stands, Eastman is ineligible to practice law in California. His license was also suspended by the Washington, D.C., bar. He is also facing felony charges in Georgia and Arizona connected with the 2020 election; both cases, in which Eastman has pleaded not guilty, are pending. None of these cases involve the birthright issue.
Eastman is still fighting disbarment, based in part on his position that his actions on Trump’s behalf are protected by his 1st Amendment free-speech rights and that his claims about the election being stolen weren’t knowingly false. Oral arguments before the state bar court are scheduled for March 19. If the disbarment recommendation stands, the final decision will be made by the state Supreme Court.
That brings us back to the birthright issue. The 14th Amendment was enacted as a direct response to the Supreme Court’s egregious 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that persons of African descent, such as enslaved people and formerly enslaved people, could not be considered citizens under the Constitution.
In its very first line, the amendment states forthrightly, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Legalistic debate over birthright tends to parse the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Most legal scholars — and courts that have considered the issue — accept the prevailing conclusion that it was meant to exclude chiefly children of foreign diplomats and ministers and those of occupying foreign armies, who remain under the jurisdiction of their own countries.
(Native American tribes were also excluded initially on the reasoning that the tribes claimed sovereign authority, but they were brought under the amendment’s protection in 1924.)
Some critics argue that the amendment could not have bestowed citizenship on the children of illegal immigrants because “illegal immigration” didn’t exist in 1868, as the U.S. then had no immigration restrictions.
That’s a dubious claim, constitutional scholar Garrett Epps has written. “‘Illegal aliens’ are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of both state and federal legal systems. They can be, and are every day, arrested, prosecuted and sentenced (even to death) in American courts,” and can be sued in civil courts.
What Trump could do about birthright citizenship is unclear. Repealing the 14th Amendment would require a new constitutional amendment, a lengthy and complicated process.
Some experts have said that Congress could act to redefine “jurisdiction,” but even a leading expert on the topic, Rogers M. Smith of the University of Pennsylvania, has acknowledged being in the “minority of scholars who think the Congress can act” to exclude undocumented immigrants’ children.
Trump might be hoping that the current Supreme Court majority, which has disdained its own precedents, would scrap this one — though whether it would discard a precedent that has stood for more than a century is an imponderable.
The Supreme Court’s support of a broad definition of birthright citizenship dates to 1898, in a ruling involving Wong Kim Ark, whose citizenship as the U.S.-born child of Chinese immigrants was challenged because his parents had had no right to become citizens themselves. The court rejected the challenge.
In a 1982 case, all nine justices accepted the view that undocumented immigrants, “even after their illegal entry” to the U.S., are covered by the 14th Amendment.
A remarkable feature of birthright citizenship is that the broadest definition is supported not only by progressives, but conservatives. Newsweek published a rebuttal to Eastman’s article in 2020 by conservative UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh. At the same time, the libertarian Cato Institute attacked Eastman’s claims head-on. And on Inauguration Day, Cato’s director of immigration studies, David J. Bier, issued a series of broadsides against Trump’s executive order, calling it a “blatantly unconstitutional… attack on American tradition, the rule of law, the Constitution, and indeed Americans themselves.”
In truth, the core issue of birthright citizenship isn’t constitutional. It’s political, and its politics are acrid in the extreme. The issue is inextricably bound up with racism and the notion of America as a beacon of white supremacy.
That has been the one constant in the opposition to birthright citizenship since the enactment of the 14th Amendment, legal scholar Rachel E. Rosenbloom has observed, noting that opposition is typically couched “in a highly racialized language of crisis and invasion.”
A proponent of a proposed 2009 California ballot initiative aimed at cutting off public benefits for undocumented immigrants, for example, asserted that “illegals and their children” were engaged in “invasion by birth canal.” (The measure didn’t make it onto the ballot.)
Trump has repeatedly employed the rhetoric of xenophobia and invasion to justify his attacks on immigrants. “They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally in 2023, referring to immigrants “from Africa, from Asia, all over the world. They’re pouring into our country.”
Opposition to birthright citizenship has tended to surge alongside concerns about immigration, especially when the latter has had a racist component. The Wong Kim Ark case was designed as a test of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the 1982 case arose as a challenge to a Texas law that denied funding for the K-12 education of undocumented immigrant children. (The Supreme Court struck down the law.)
Eastman told me in 2020 that he was troubled by what he called the “false charge” that he questioned birthright citizenship merely “because Kamala Harris is Black.” He said then that he had been studying and writing about so-called birthright citizenship for nearly 20 years “in all sorts of contexts,” not merely Black politicians.
Notwithstanding Eastman’s disavowal of racist intent, one can’t attribute the same innocence to Trump and his immigration policy team. In his Jan. 20 executive order on border security, he again invoked “the language of crisis and invasion” — “Over the last 4 years,” the order states, “the United States has endured a large-scale invasion at an unprecedented level.”
Truly, the ideological basis of the attack on birthright citizenship has barely changed in 127 years.
Sweetgreen’s salad business isn’t as fresh as it used to be.
Not long ago, the Los-Angeles-based company’s fresh bowls of fancy salads were all the rage, and its shares soared on hopes that salad-slinging robots could make it more profitable.
Last year was tough, though, as enthusiasm for the brand waned and cash-strapped diners abandoned fast-casual options for cheaper fast food and homemade meals.
Sweetgreen’s same-store sales slid 9.5% last quarter, even as it increased portion sizes and tried new menu items — including French fries, which flopped. It laid off 10% of its support center workforce in Los Angeles, and one of its founders stepped down.
Over the last 12 months, Sweetgreen shares have tumbled more than 75%. The stock closed Thursday at $8.
“Sweetgreen is more of a premium health product, and it’s going to cost more than a Big Mac,” said retail expert Dominick Miserandino, who runs the company Retail Tech Media Nexus.
“The average consumer, when they’re hit with survival-type questions about basic necessities, wellness is not going to be No. 1 for them,” he said.
Younger consumers are showing less interest in Sweetgreen salads at the same time as tariffs and other factors are driving inflation. The company fell short of Wall Street’s expectations last quarter with a net loss of $36.1 million on revenue of $172.4 million.
“Performance was impacted by softer sales,” Sweetgreen co-founder and Chief Executive Jonathon Neman said in November. “This was coupled with lighter spending among younger guests.”
As it braces for the future, Sweetgreen decided to sell the food automation company it bought only a few years ago. Sweetgreen closed the sale of its automated kitchen technology, dubbed Infinite Kitchen, to the takeout and food delivery company Wonder Group last month.
Spyce, the business unit behind Infinite Kitchen, was sold for close to $200 milion in cash and shares of Wonder’s Series C preferred stock. Sweetgreen bought Spyce in 2021 for about $70 million. Sweetgreen will continue to use the technology in some restaurants. The tech uses automatic conveyor belts to assemble salads and other meals.
“The sale marks a strategic milestone for Sweetgreen, enabling the company to reinvest in key priorities and focus on growth and operational efficiency,” the company said in a news release.
Sweetgreen did not respond to a request for comment.
Sweetgreen was founded in 2007 in Washington by Georgetown students looking to make healthy food as convenient as fast food. It moved its headquarters to Los Angeles in 2016.
The chain has grown to more than 280 stores in the U.S.
California — with 56 Sweetgreens — is the state with the most locations.
The company made its initial public offering in 2021, and a day later was valued at nearly $6 billion. Sweetgreen is now worth around $900 million.
Fast-casual eateries — considered a step above fast food but more affordable than a full-service restaurant — once boomed in popularity. But value-seeking consumers are now turning to other options, said Evert Gruyaert, head of U.S. restaurants and food service at Deloitte.
“There is extremely strong competition and pressure coming from quick-service brands, and casual dining now has very compelling value offers too,” he said. “Fast casual is really squeezed in the middle.”
Fast-casual chains such as Cava and Newport Beach-based Chipotle popularized the customizable lunch bowl, usually including a protein, grain, and veggies.
The idea took off after Chipotle founder Steve Ells noticed that customers were opening up their burritos and asking for a fork. The Mexican chain launched bowls in 2003, paving the way for the Mediterranean bowl destination Cava to open in 2006.
Sweetgreen’s menu includes a range of salads as well as warm bowls featuring rice, salmon and chicken. A caramelized garlic steak bowl sells for $17.95, and a garden cobb salad is $15.75.
With tax, tip and a drink, customers could easily spend more than $20 on lunch.
The trend of lunching on big bowls of healthy ingredients has lost some momentum in recent years.
On social media, some diners are complaining about “slop bowls,” saying that lunch shouldn’t be just a collection of ingredients thrown in a bowl.
Chipotle shares have slid about 30% over the last year and Cava shares have fallen close to 40% over the same time frame. Ells, who left Chipotle in 2020, returned to sandwiches and handheld foods in his new venture Counter Service.
On an earnings call in November, Sweetgreen’s Neman said the chain’s new handheld product will begin market testing early this year.
Whether in a bowl or on bread, much of Sweetgreen’s appeal comes from the perception that it’s a healthy choice. But even in Southern California, where wellness is often top of mind, its offerings are failing to attract as many customers as they once did.
“If you’re financially pushed to the limit, you need fast food to get you through the day at the cheapest possible price,” Miserandino said.
Millennials and Gen. Z, who according to Neman make up about a third of Sweetgreen’s customer base, are facing a difficult job market and cutting back on spending more than their older peers.
Sweetgreen is trying to find a way back into the sweet spot of salad consumers. It debuted a new nutrient-dense menu, created in collaboration with the wellness company Function.
The menu, which follows a recent surge in demand for protein and other macronutrients, includes options with extra iron, omega-3 fatty acids and antioxidants.
“Amid a challenging macro backdrop, our priorities remain clear,” Neman said in November. “I am extremely confident that our leadership team and focused strategy will lead Sweetgreen back to sustained, profitable growth.”
After nearly 14 years at the helm, Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy will step down this week, marking a major — though expected — changing of the guard at the Walt Disney Co.-owned “Star Wars” studio.
In her place, current Lucasfilm Chief Creative Officer Dave Filoni has been named president and will retain his creative title and Lucasfilm Business President and General Manager Lynwen Brennan has been named co-president, Disney said Thursday. The pair will co-lead the San Francisco-based studio and will report to Disney Entertainment Co-Chairman Alan Bergman.
“When George Lucas asked me to take over Lucasfilm upon his retirement, I couldn’t have imagined what lay ahead,” said Kennedy, 72, in a statement Thursday. “It has been a true privilege to spend more than a decade working alongside the extraordinary talent at Lucasfilm. Their creativity and dedication have been an inspiration, and I’m deeply proud of what we’ve accomplished together. I’m excited to continue developing films and television with both longtime collaborators and fresh voices who represent the future of storytelling.”
The move comes amid widespread speculation about Kennedy’s future. Handpicked in 2012 by “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” creator George Lucas to helm the company he founded, Kennedy oversaw the expansion of the “Star Wars” franchise into a new trilogy, two spin-off movies, as well as several TV shows, including “The Mandalorian” and “Andor.” Under her leadership, the studio also grew its presence in Disney’s theme parks with “Star Wars”-themed lands in both Anaheim’s Disneyland Resort and Walt Disney World in Florida.
But the expansion, and her tenure, were not without setbacks.
2018’s “Solo: A Star Wars Story” grossed a disappointing $392.9 million at the box office, after a fraught production in which the studio replaced the directors during shooting. Several “Star Wars” projects have been announced over the years with big names attached, only to be delayed or dropped, including a planned trilogy with “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.
Kennedy told The Times in 2019 that perceptions of director churn at Lucasfilm were overblown.
“Nobody in our business develops something with one person, that’s it, and everything goes perfectly,” she said at the time. “That’s a fairly common part of the process. We fall under incredible scrutiny because it’s ‘Star Wars.’ Because of the quality I’m striving for, I’m reaching out to top talent, and vice versa.”
Kennedy also had to weather scrutiny from die-hard fans about the new direction of the franchise. Nevertheless, the newest “Star Wars” trilogy grossed a collective $4.3 billion in worldwide box office revenue, with spinoff “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” hauling in more than $1 billion globally and leading to the popular series “Andor.”
She will continue as producer of Lucasfilm’s next two theatrical films — May’s “Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu” and “Star Wars: Starfighter,” which is being helmed by “Deadpool & Wolverine” director Shawn Levy and set for release in 2027.
“The Mandalorian and Grogu” will mark the first “Star Wars” theatrical film since 2019’s “Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker.” During production for that movie, Kennedy asked Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger if the company could take a pause on “Star Wars” films to give them more time develop new storylines. At that point, the company had released at least one “Star Wars” movie a year since 2015, while Lucas himself had previously waited at least three years between films. (Since 2019, the studio did release “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” as well as several “Star Wars”-adjacent series and and streaming films, including some Lego movies and an ILM documentary.)
“When we acquired Lucasfilm more than a decade ago, we knew we were bringing into the Disney family not only one of the most beloved and enduring storytelling universes ever created, but also a team of extraordinary talent led by a visionary filmmaker — someone who had been handpicked by George Lucas himself, no less,” Iger said in a statement Thursday. “We’re deeply grateful for Kathleen Kennedy’s leadership, her vision, and her stewardship of such an iconic studio and brand.”
Both Filoni and Brennan step into their new roles as Lucasfilm veterans.
Filoni, who frequently wears a cowboy hat in public and is thus widely recognizable to fans, was chosen by Lucas in 2005 to build the studio’s animation business. He created Lucasfilm’s first series, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” as well as “Star Wars Rebels,” was the executive producer on shows including “The Mandalorian” and “Ahsoka” and is producer and writer of the “The Mandalorian and Grogu” film.
Brennan joined Lucasfilm visual effects studio Industrial Light & Magic in 1999 and currently leads business strategy, franchise and production operations, as well as ILM’s expansion worldwide.
Paramount suffered a blow in a Delaware courtroom Thursday as a judge refused to expedite its lawsuit against Warner Bros. Discovery seeking information about internal deliberations and a financial analysis.
Reuters reported that Vice Chancellor Morgan T. Zurn of the Delaware Chancery Court said during a hearing that Paramount had failed to show it would suffer “cognizable irreparable harm” without the financial details it sought.
Now the pressure is on Paramount to win over Warner shareholders before next week’s tender offer deadline. Investors have until Wednesday to sell their stock to Paramount for $30 a share. Paramount could extend that deadline.
Paramount sued on Monday, claiming investors needed information that Warner has yet to provide about how board members valued various assets in determining that its sale to Netflix was more lucrative.
Paramount wanted the judge to fast-track the proceedings to help boost its outreach to Warner shareholders.
The David Ellison-led company has insisted its $108-billion deal, including absorption of Warner debt, represents a higher value for Warner shareholders than Netflix’s Dec. 4 cash-and-stock deal. Warner board members closed the auction that night, awarding Netflix the prize.
Netflix, which has seen its stock slide about 17% since early December, is reportedly weighing whether to bolster its bid by offering all cash for Warner Bros. movie and television studio, HBO and HBO Max. Netflix declined to comment.
Paramount wants to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including CNN and the other basic cable channels.
In a statement Thursday, Warner Bros. Discovery said Paramount Skydance’s legal challenge “was yet another unserious attempt to distract and the Judge saw right through it.”
“We are pleased a Delaware Court agreed with our belief and rejected the notion that this lawsuit needed special treatment and may have other serious flaws,” Warner Bros. Discovery said. “Despite its multiple opportunities, Paramount Skydance continues to propose a transaction that our board unanimously concluded is not superior to the merger agreement with Netflix.”
Paramount downplayed its latest setback, saying Zurn’s ruling “does not pertain to the merits of Paramount’s claim.”
Paramount, in its statement, said that Warner shareholders deserved information about how Warner board’s evaluated the value for Warner’s cable channels to better compare the two proposals.
Netflix doesn’t want the cable channels allowing Warner to move forward with plans to spin off those channels this summer. Warner shareholders would get stock in that new company, called Discovery Global.
“WBD shareholders should ask why their Board is working so hard to hide this information,” Paramount said, adding it “continues to urge WBD to make these disclosures so that WBD shareholders can make an informed decision.”
Times staff writer Samantha Masunaga contributed to this report.
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