This thread topic is flat out wrong
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blo...utional-rights
The U.S. Supreme Court settled the issue well over a century ago. But even before the court laid the issue to rest, a principal author of the Constitution, James Madison, the fourth president of the United States, wrote: "that as they [aliens], owe, on the one hand, a temporary obedience, they are entitled, in return, to their [constitutional] protection and advantage."
More recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zadvydas v. Davis (2001) that "due process" of the 14th Amendment applies to all aliens in the United States whose presence maybe or is "unlawful, involuntary or transitory."
Twenty years before Zadvydas, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Texas could not enforce a state law that prohibited illegally present children from attending grade schools, as all other Texas children were required to attend.
The court ruled in Plyler that:
The illegal aliens who are ... challenging the state may claim the benefit of the Equal Protection clause which provides that no state shall 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.' Whatever his status under immigration laws, an alien is a 'person' in any ordinary sense of the term ... the undocumented status of these children does not establish a sufficient rational basis for denying benefits that the state affords other residents.
A decade before Plyler, the court ruled in Almeida-Sanchez v. United States (1973) that all criminal charge-related elements of the Constitution's amendments (the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and the 14th) such as search and seizure, self-incrimination, trial by jury and due process, protect non-citizens, legally or illegally present.
