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NBC posts major correction to story about citizenship for military families

NBC posts major correction to story about citizenship for military families

“Correction: Experts who have looked at new USCIS policy say it applies if a service member adopts a child overseas, but children born to service members on deployment would still automatically get citizenship”

https://youtu.be/oDFok77Tgzg

There has been another walk-back of shame for our press this week.

Earlier this week, social media was breathlessly spreading NBC’s report that new Trump administration guidelines could potentially deny “birthright citizenship” to the children of American military members abroad.

President Donald Trump has a strong relationship with the military. I could not imagine that changes to the citizenship status of service members’ children would be in jeopardy. So when I first read the messages, I rolled my eyes and anticipated it would be shown to #FakeNews.

And it was.

Ken Dilanian, an NBC news correspondent who covers national security, tweeted the following on Wednesday afternoon.

https://twitter.com/jason_howerton/status/1166837895962988544?s=12

The correction came an hour later:

https://twitter.com/KenDilanianNBC/status/1166819546789023745?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

Reason contributor Elizabeth Nolan Brown offers further details on the policy.

The change will not apply to children born to any U.S. citizens serving in the military or otherwise working abroad. It will apply only in cases of foreign adoption by U.S. citizen parents, or children born to parents were not U.S. citizens at the time of the child’s birth. A Department of Defense spokesperson said the shift would affect about 100 children annually.

Acting USCIS Director Ken Cuccinelli clarified that the policy “does NOT impact birthright citizenship.”

It also does not mean that the children will be denied citizenship, just that parents have to submit an application. The change was made to bring the definition of residence in the immigration law in line with State Department guidance, USCIS told CNN.

Watch Cuccinelli explain on EWTN:

Despite the clarification, some immigration activists insist the rule-change is unfair.

But the new policy places an unfair burden on children born to non-citizen service members, according to a spokesman for a D.C.-based federal employment and military law firm.

“If both parents are U.S. citizens, their children have derivative citizenship regardless, so this is a penalty placed upon those who would serve their country and who do not have a say where they are stationed,” Shaun May of the Federal Practice Groups told Military Times in a statement.

“They serve at the direction and pleasure of the president.”

I recall the hysteria over the military birthright citizen issue when it first broke, as it was the lead trending topic on Twitter for quite some time. Some lowlights:

If it was NBC’s intention to report accurate and essential news, it failed miserably. If, on the other hand, NBC wanted to gin-up more anti-Trump hysteria and hostility toward our president, then it was a solid hit.

As far as I am concerned, the peacock laid an egg with this story and gave me even more reason to turn to foreign press for accurate coverage of American news.

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Comments

We could have a daily or weekly round-up of false news. Unfortunately, the bee ess never stops.

One question raised by tweet above, did anyone at USCIS confirm original story? If so who?

    I’m quite positive NBC went to USCIS and asked, then promptly printed what they had written already without actually listening to what USCIS said. They had a perfectly good story, so why ruin it with inconvenient facts.

Free State Paul | August 31, 2019 at 12:56 pm

If you turn to the foreign press for accurate coverage, don’t watch BBC World News. They hate Trump more than CNN.

notamemberofanyorganizedpolicital | August 31, 2019 at 1:00 pm

NBC (Nothing But Crap) is in existence as an entity why????

Yeah, this is just another demonstration of the Fake News media. A simple policy change to solve a legitimate (although niche) issue, and they straight up lie about it.

To be blunt, a handful of service members were scamming the system. They’d accept a large payment from foreign to ‘adopt’ their kids, have them declared citizens, then they would petition for their REAL parents and extended family’s admittance to the US as family members of US citizens.

It was a real, although VERY rare occurrence.

Mother and father citizens. Natural born. Unambiguous.

Mother and father legal residents. Naturalized citizenship. Unambiguous.

Combined status. Naturalized citizenship. Unambiguous.

Womb bank and/or sperm deposit. See above.

Diplomatic immunity. No citizenship. Unambiguous.

Invasion, illegal immigration, and similar. No citizenship for you.

    artichoke in reply to n.n. | August 31, 2019 at 9:42 pm

    Nope, that’s not the policy. We wish it were.

    Illegal joins military, has baby overseas even with local of country they’re stationed in (Iraq is pretty likely) that baby is a citizen and serves as anchor baby for the military member.

      IndependentDem in reply to artichoke. | September 1, 2019 at 12:55 am

      Not so. A non-citizen can’t transmit citizenship to a child born outside of the US, even if he or she is serving in the US military, even if they are a green card holder (non-citizen). Even if a US citizen, the transmitting citizen must have 5 years of physical presence in the US, 2 of those years after the age of 14, to transmit. I adjudicate cases of this nature every day as the Passport and Citizenship chief at one of America’s largest embassies.

        And now, as I understand it, those 2 and 5 years must be spent in the actual USA. Time spent on a US base overseas no longer counts. I don’t think that’s at all unreasonable.

So the rule now conforms to the law. And liberals again find that disturbing.

my gosh, all this “breathless” news, the cdc should look into it as a health hazard… like dark web vaping juice

What? They were supposed to READ the policy before reporting on it??

Who does that???

Why let such troublesome and insignificant conceits as “facts” get in the way of promoting the anti-Trump narrative?

What’s contemptible is that this ceaseless anti-Trump fanaticism and zealotry from the Dhimmi-crats and their media lackeys is the flip side of the ceaseless and slavish fealty, deference and general reverence that they showed to the sainted Obama and his policies.

“Oh, the Iran ‘deal?’ That’s not a transparent vanity exercise and a naive, criminally-negligent and self-congratulatory capitulation to genocide-aspiring Islamic supremacism and belligerence — this is the grandest piece of statecraft in U.S. history!”

To name but one example.

Oopsie. But I’m sure it was an honest mistake!

Does anybody here ever watch NBC?

    Now you’re falling into the Pauline Kael trap. You and I don’t watch NBC, and nobody we know watches it, so you are lead to assume nobody does. But many people clearly do, or it would have gone bankrupt long ago. I don’t know who those people are, but they’re out there, probably surrounding us, just like the Nixon voters Kael was talking about.

It really is a sort of a loophole, illegal alien joins the military, is paid, is even deployed, has a kid with full maternity services from the military, now there’s an anchor baby.

It’s still US policy.

Why do we have non-citizens in the military when we’re turning away some citizens?

I saw the headlines yesterday and didn’t even bother to read the articles, just sat back and listened to the thwap of rakes impacting faces.

Man, you people are mangling the policy and the clarification as badly as NBC did. You all need to stop it with the fake news until you can exhibit some reading comprehension.

The change has nothing to do with scams or anchor babies.

USCIS was using a definition of citizenship that differed from the State Department in the case of children born outside the U.S. ADOPTED by U.S. citizens when the birth parents were not US citizens and/or the adoptive parent was a green card holder and not yet a citizen at the time of the adoption. In some cases this caused problems issuing passports for those children due to INCORRECT DOCUMENTATION. There has been no change in the overall policy, just a clarification of how the children’s naturalization and citizenship need to be documented. The example cited was a U.S. military member who marries a local citizen and adopts their children. I believe USCIS was previously saying those kids were citizens but State said no, they have to fill out naturalization forms.