Children lost in the shuffle of immigration raids.... US Born kids left behind when parents are taken.... these headlines and the story somehow leave the impression that childen born here of illegal aliens are automatically US citizens. This has never, ever been true as can be seen in this explanation of the 14th Amendment citizenship clause by the person who wrote it: "Every Person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, or who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States." ............Senator Jacob Howard of Michigan, co-author of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, 1866. The 14th Amendment was added to the Constitution as part of the post-Civil War reforms aimed at addressing injustices to African Americans. It states that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States" and was crafted so that state governments could never deny citizenship to blacks born in the United States. The phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was intended to exclude from automatic citizenship American-born persons whose allegiance to the United States was not complete. In the case of illegal aliens who are temporarily or unlawfully in the United States, because their native country has a claim of allegiance on the child, the completeness of the allegiance to the United States is impaired and logically precludes automatic citizenship. All words used in a legislation are intended to have meaning and that, if the meaning of a word or phrase is unclear or ambiguous, the congressional debate over the legislation may indicate the authors' intent. These scholars therefore presume that "subject to the jurisdiction" means something different from "born in the United States," so they have looked to the original Senate debate over the Fourteenth Amendment to determine its meaning. They conclude that the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment did NOT want to grant citizenship to every person who happened to be born on U.S. soil. In fact, Senator Howard proposed the addition of the phrase specifically because he wanted to make clear that the simple accident of birth in the United States was not sufficient to justify citizenship. Sen. Howard noted that the jurisdiction requirement is "simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already." Sen. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, who was the only Democrat to participate in the Senate debate, was even more explicit about the meaning of the jurisdiction requirement: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to some foreign Power -- for that, no doubt, is the meaning of the committee who have brought the matter before --