CRBA Lawsuit Against DOS Filed: Chacoty et al. v. Kerry et al.

"American citizenship is the “right to have rights.1”  Defendants have denied Plaintiffs’ statutory right to American citizenship.  For decades, Defendants have applied the statute in the ways described below to grant citizenship.2  Suddenly, without any statutory change, regulatory guidance or caselaw command, Defendants have changed course 180 degrees, denying citizenship to Plaintiffs under facts identical to those in which, years past, citizenship was freely granted.3  The purpose of this lawsuit is to ask this Honorable Court to cause Defendants to correct their grievous error." - Chacoty et al. v. Kerry et al., filed in the D.C. Dist. Ct. on May 2, 2014, Case 1:14-cv-00764.

Footnotes:

1 “Citizenship is man's basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.” Perez v. Brownell, 356 U.S. 44, 64 (1958)(Chief Justice Warren, dissenting); overruled by Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253 (1967).

2 See generally, Isaacson, Correcting Anomalies in the United States Law of Citizenship by Descent, 47 Ariz. L. Rev. 313 (Summer 2005).

3 See, e.g., “State Department Ratchets Up INA 301(c) 'Residence' Fight,” posted on the LexisNexis Immigration Law Legal Newsroom on Feb. 17, 2012 at:
http://www.lexisnexis.com/legalnewsroom/immigration/b/insidenews/archive/2012/02/17/state-department-ratchets-up-ina-301-c-residence-fight.aspx