News Archive

A teen born in Dallas faces a hearing in an immigration court over the fact that his mother received a Mexican birth certificate for him when he was three years old. Professor Gerard Magliocca talked about the Fourteenth Amendment in relation to the case in a story published by the Dallas Morning News.

The case involves Francisco Galicia, a high school senior who was born in Dallas's Parkland Hospital. His parents divorced, and his mother moved to Mexico and wanted to enroll her son in school. She was told he would need to be a Mexican citizen, so she got him a birth certificate there. The young man has not renounced his U.S. citizenship.

Because Galicia's birth was registered in the U.S. nearly three years before his mother obtained the Mexican birth certificate, the young man is "constitutionally speaking" a U.S. citizen, Professor Magliocca said in the story. The newspaper spoke with him because of his expertise in constitutional law, and his extensive writing about the Fourteenth Amendment, the amendment that grants birthright citizenship to those born on U.S. soil.

Professor Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor of Law at IU McKinney. He is the author of four books, the latest of which, The Heart of the Constitution: How the Bill of Rights Became the Bill of Rights, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. He also is the author of over 20 articles on constitutional law and intellectual property. He was named to the 2019-2020 class of fellows for the Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon.