President Donald Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship challenges a landmark legal victory won by a San Francisco Chinatown institution over a century ago.
Now, the community is once again embracing its legacy of fighting for immigrant rights by opposing Trump’s order. San Francisco joined a coalition of plaintiffs Tuesday in one of three lawsuits that aim to block the order. On Friday, San Francisco District Attorney David Chiu joined a dozen community leaders, local experts and historians at the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association to reflect on the community’s history of fighting discriminatory immigration policies.
“Donald Trump has repeatedly and blatantly disregarded the rule of law and our Constitution,” said Chiu.
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One of the key cases discussed was the U.S. Supreme Court’s 127-year-old ruling that affirmed birthright citizenship in a case brought by a San Franciscan named Wong Kim Ark.
Wong was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown to Chinese parents but was denied reentry to the U.S. after a trip abroad in 1895. Authorities stopped him from coming back in under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the U.S. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, which already existed then, raised funds and hired prominent lawyers to bring Wong’s case to the Supreme Court, where they won. The Benevolent Association was founded as a coalition of associations formed by immigrants with shared roots in seven regions of southern China. It once governed Chinatown and was known as the Chinese Six Companies, because it formed with six associations.
“This is not a one-off case,” said community historian David Lei, adding that the community spearheaded some 10,000 civil rights lawsuits in the first 23 of the more than 60 years the Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect.
Lei shared several examples of the significant legal victories led by the city’s Chinese community, including the landmark Supreme Court case Yick Wo v. Hopkins, which was led by a Chinese laundry owner challenging a discriminatory enforcement of a city ordinance. The law in question prohibited operating a laundry in wooden buildings without a permit, but of more than 200 Chinese-owned laundries in wooden buildings, only one was granted a permit, while all but one non-Chinese applicant received permits. The 1886 ruling affirmed equal protection under the law.
“The real story was: We fought back,” Lei said.
The result of that legacy is now under direct threat from Trump, who signed multiple executive orders targeting immigrant rights on his first day in office.
In their suit against the birthright citizenship order, plaintiffs including the city of San Francisco argue the order violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
On Thursday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, delaying its effective date by 14 days, to early March .
“It’s not just a Chinese issue,” said Bill Ong Hing, a professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco. Hing noted that the anti-Chinese sentiment from a century ago has resurfaced in new forms, now targeting immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Norman Wong, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, echoed Hing, saying that other family members who were not of Chinese descent were affected by past discriminatory policies. Wong’s mother, who is Japanese American, was forcibly taken to an incarceration camp with her family under Executive Order 9066 during World War II.
“These are the consequences of these unequal laws,” Wong said.
Now that a temporary restraining order has been issued in one of the three lawsuits in progress against Trump’s order, City Attorney David Chiu said he expects those lawsuits to prevail in appellate court, but that the Trump administration will likely appeal the appellate rulings all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Chiu describedthe legal battle to preserve birthright citizenship as a clear-cut case, but he said he suspected the executive order was issued in part to “deter immigrant communities from feeling safe, and create fear in our country.”
The legal battles come at a time when Chinese Americans in San Francisco are preparing to celebrate the Lunar New Year.
“I hope that during the Chinese New Year period, as we’re celebrating Chinatown, we’re also celebrating the role that we played in leading the civil rights against Chinese exclusion, against anti Chinese violence, and certainly for the right of birthright citizenship,” said Malcolm Yeung, executive director of the Chinatown Community Development Center.