One hundred and twenty-seven years after Wong Kim Ark's landmark Supreme Court victory enshrined birthright citizenship, Norman Wong arrived at the University of California at Berkeley in late April on a quest to protect his great-grandfather’s legacy.
Wong, 75, clutched a piece of paper before a campus forum on immigration — a short speech he had revised four times — but he carried no photos or family heirlooms. For most of his life, he had not heard of Wong Kim Ark, a poor cook born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in 1870.
But since President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January to end automatic citizenship for U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and foreign visitors, Norman Wong has been thrust into a life of unexpected local celebrity and political activism. He is held up by supporters as a living testament to the man whose fight for American citizenship — with its presumed guarantees of civil rights, free speech and due process — had gotten lost through the years.
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