The court’s decision is likely to be handed down just before the country’s 250th anniversary, giving the already blockbuster case even more significance.
Protesters line up outside the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship hearing.
“Birthright citizenship is ours!” demonstrators shouted. outside the supreme court in washington d.c.
WASHINGTON – Who are the Americans?
This is the fundamental question the Supreme Court will take up on April 1 when it considers President Donald Trump’s ability to severely restrict children born in the United States from automatically becoming citizens.
The court’s decision is likely to be handed down just before the country celebrates its 250th anniversary.th The anniversary adds even more significance to an already blockbuster case.
This is another opportunity for the Supreme Court to consider expanded powers that President Trump has asserted since returning to the White House last year.
Can he change the definition of birthright citizenship with a stroke of the pen? “What the president’s executive order seeks to do is rewrite civil rights as we have known them since the late 19th century.”th said Cesar Cuauhtemoc García Hernández, an immigration law expert at the Ohio State University School of Law.
What does the Constitution say about birthright citizenship?
14th The amendment, ratified in 1868, states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are nationals of the United States and of the states in which they reside.”
This has long been interpreted to include everyone except diplomats, invading troops, and children born to Native Americans who originally achieved birthright citizenship under a 1924 law.
In a landmark decision in 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the citizenship rights of Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco-born man. The man’s parents were Chinese, and the law at the time prohibited him from becoming a citizen.
And the immigration law enacted in mid-2020th Almost the same language was used in this century as in the 14th century.th Fixed.
But President Trump said the text had been misread.
He argues that “subject to that jurisdiction” excludes children born to parents who are not citizens. This is because, even though they must obey U.S. laws while abroad, they may feel loyal to a foreign country. The Supreme Court’s 1898 decision applied to children whose parents are “domiciled and domiciled in the United States,” according to the Justice Department.
What are President Trump’s policies?
On his first day in office, President Trump directed federal officials to deny citizenship to infants born in the United States without at least one parent being an American citizen or lawful permanent resident (a “green card” holder).
The executive order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Values of American Citizenship,” is one of more than 500 policy changes by the administration that longtime immigration law scholar Stephen Yale Lohr said are among the most sweeping immigration restrictions in modern U.S. history.
Yale Roher, a former professor at Cornell Law School, said these policies are “different in scale and quality” than those pushed by President Trump in his first administration.
But while the president has great discretion over who is allowed into the United States, he differs in defining who is a natural-born American.
“Historically, all Supreme Courts have respected presidents on immigration issues because immigration concerns sovereignty and foreign affairs,” he said. “This involves provisions of the Constitution itself.”
Second round at the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court took up President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order last year, but only decided whether lower courts had gone too far in blocking its enforcement while the order was being challenged.
In a 6-3 decision in June, the court rejected the way the justices had left President Trump’s order on ice while leaving him another path.
And it didn’t take long for the road to be used.
In July, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked a civil rights order in a class-action lawsuit brought by affected children and their parents.
Judge Joseph LaPlante said the order likely contradicted Article 14.th The amendment and the untouched century-old precedent for interpreting it. ” He also said it could violate federal law that contains similar language.
Who is challenging President Trump’s policies?
The parents representing their children in the lawsuit include a woman from Honduras who has lived in the United States since 2024 and gave birth in the months after Trump signed the executive order.
The woman, known by the pseudonym “Barbara,” said in a court filing that she is seeking asylum from gang activity in Honduras and that her family is part of the local community in New Hampshire.
Another mother who is challenging the order came to the United States from Taiwan on a student visa in 2013 and is applying for a work visa. She and her husband have four children, three of whom were born in the U.S. before Trump’s executive order and one after.
“My husband and I ended up building a life here,” the woman known as “Susan” said in a court filing. “My baby deserves American citizenship and a future.”
“Our Foundation as a Nation”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which represents immigrants, has argued to the Supreme Court that birthright citizenship is “foundational to us as a nation.”
“This case is about the administration’s efforts to redefine what America is,” said Cody Wofsy, an attorney with the ACLU Immigrant Rights Project. “If you go back to the founding of this country, the rule was that if you were born in this country, you were an American.”
The Civil Rights Clause of the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War to repudiate the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that blacks are not citizens of the United States, covers “all persons.”
Under President Trump’s policies, about 255,000 children born on U.S. soil each year would start their lives without U.S. citizenship, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Supporters of Trump and his executive orders argue that he is trying to protect American citizenship from devaluation.
“This debate is not just about immigration policy. It’s about what it means to be an American citizen,” Sen. Eric Schmidt, R-Missouri, said during a recent Senate hearing on the issue. “When citizenship loses its meaning, the foundations of the republic begin to weaken from within.”
What defines citizenship?
Schmidt said citizenship must be rooted in loyalty to a national community and should not apply to children of people who are in the country as students, tourists or without government permission.
But Alejandro Barranco, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran whose father was violently arrested by immigration officials last year while living in the U.S. without legal status, said it’s proof that belonging to a nation is determined by someone’s contributions, not ancestry.
“I was born here, I grew up here, I served here,” Barranco told the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I love this country and I have shown it through my actions.”
A 2025 Pew Research Center poll found that while there was near unanimous agreement that people born in this country to parents who were born in the United States or to parents who immigrated legally should be citizens, the public was evenly divided on the issue of birthright citizenship for people whose parents were illegal immigrants.
Half of the adults surveyed said these infants should have citizenship, while 49% disagreed.
What decision might the Supreme Court make?
One reason the Supreme Court often agrees to take cases is because lower courts are divided on the issue.
Garcia Hernandez, an immigration law expert at Ohio State University School of Law, said an easier path for the Supreme Court would have been to dismiss the administration’s appeal because none of the justices who reviewed Trump’s policy found it legal.
“But that’s not what they did,” he said. “That suggests there are some justices who are inclined to agree with the president.”
The biggest event of the century?
But the justices may have intended to get a final answer in Trump v. Barbara.
Eric Wessan, an attorney with the Iowa attorney general’s office who joined the legal brief prepared by Republican attorneys general who support Mr. Trump, said the court could take a narrower path.
Rather than determining the original meaning of 14;th He said the proposed amendment would simply allow the justices to say that an executive order cannot overturn the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act, which uses similar language that was well understood at the time.
“This is what I would call a Chief Justice (John) Roberts special, where he can avoid very difficult constitutional justice decisions and at the same time reaffirm the supremacy of Congress,” Ouessant said in a webinar previewing the debate.
In a submission to the Supreme Court, renowned constitutional law scholar Akil Reed Amal urged the justices not to avoid addressing constitutional issues by focusing solely on immigration and citizenship law. He said the case could be the most important of this century.
“All constitutional questions are important,” Amal wrote, “but few compare to the constitutional question in this case. Who are the Americans? Can the president ignore the Constitution itself? Can the president ignore valid laws of Congress and make himself the dictator of all laws?”
