Ava DuVernay to make Netflix documentary 14th on birthright citizenship | Ava DuVernay
Ava DuVernay announced Thursday that she is producing a documentary for Netflix about the 14th amendment, which granted freedom and rights to formerly enslaved people after the Civil War, and has come under legal attack from Donald Trump.
Netflix said Thursday that it will release the 14th episode this year. The film will mark a return to the world of nonfiction for DuVernay, who produced Selma and Origin, and will be a sequel to her 2016 film 13th, in which DuVernay examined the legacy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.
The 14th amendment has been one of Trump’s major goals. On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that would greatly restrict the birthright citizenship protected by the amendment. In June, the high court rejected Trump’s decision by a vote of 6 to 3.
The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868 during Reconstruction, states: “All persons born or naturalized within the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State in which they reside.” The constitutional amendment overruled the 1857 supreme court decision in Dred Scott v Sandford, which stated that descendants of enslaved people could not become citizens.
DuVernay said her film will detail how the 14th amendment became a “permanent debate.” Politicians, historians and cultural voices will feature.
“If the 13th person asks who gets caged, the 14th person asks who gets counted out,” DuVernay said in a statement. “This isn’t a movie about a bygone time of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The movie asks what kind of country is being written under our feet right now… while we’re too busy believing the stories we’re all told.”
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, upheld the amendment’s protections, which provide that anyone born in the country becomes a citizen, with very limited exceptions.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to participate freely in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment made this promise ‘to every man freeborn in this land,'” Roberts wrote. “Today we keep this promise”
Trump has vowed to continue appealing the high court’s decision. “If they don’t change their completely insane decision, this injustice will destroy America,” he wrote on Truth Social after the decision.
