Ava DuVernay to make Netflix documentary 14th on birthright citizenship

Ava DuVernay announced on Thursday that she has made a documentary for Netflix on the 14th amendment, which gave liberty and rights to formerly enslaved people following the civil war, and has come under legal attack from Donald Trump.

Netflix said on Thursday that it will release 14th later this year. The film will mark a return to nonfiction for DuVernay, the film-maker of Selma and Origin, and a follow-up to DuVernay’s 2016 film 13th, her examination of the legacy of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery.

The 14th amendment has been a prominent target of Trump’s. On the first day of his second term, he signed an executive order that would have heavily restricted birthright citizenship as protected by the amendment. In June, the supreme court struck down Trump’s order by a 6-3 vote.

The 14th amendment, ratified in 1868 during Reconstruction states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The constitutional amendment nullified the 1857 supreme court decision Dred Scott v Sandford, which had held that those descended from enslaved people couldn’t be citizens.

DuVernay said her film will detail how the 14th amendment became “a permanent argument”. It will feature politicians, historians and cultural voices.

“If 13th asked who gets caged, then 14th asks who gets counted,” DuVernay said in a statement. “This is not a film about the past tense of freedom. I’m not interested in asking you to look back. The film asks what kind of country is being written beneath our feet now … while we’re busy believing the stories we’ve all been told.”

Chief justice, John Roberts, writing for the court, upheld the protections of the amendment, which makes a citizen of anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” wrote Roberts. “We keep that promise today.”

Trump has vowed to continue to contest the supreme court’s ruling. Following the decision, he wrote on Truth Social: “This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”