The Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship case sparked a contentious briefing between the court’s two black justices.
Supreme Court rejects President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order
The Supreme Court has lifted restrictions on birthright citizenship, the centerpiece of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy.
The Supreme Court’s June 30 rejection of President Donald Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship also fueled a debate between the court’s two black justices.
Judge Clarence Thomas, appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush, and Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by Democratic President Joe Biden, differed sharply on aspects of the case’s key issue: whether the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the United States.
The case stemmed from President Trump’s orders to federal agencies. do not have Grants citizenship to infants born in the United States if at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Expectant parents, immigrant rights groups, and 22 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit challenging the order.
The 6-3 majority decision found that President Trump cannot change the definition of how constitutional guarantees have been historically understood and that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily still meet the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are nationals of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”
President Trump has argued that the amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, was intended to protect the rights of enslaved children, not the rights of temporary visitors or illegal immigrants it sought to exclude.
Justices Thomas and Jackson focused in part on the court’s infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which ruled that slaves could not become citizens or claim the resulting rights and privileges.
In his dissent, Justice Thomas said Congress overruled Dred Scott under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment. But neither provision confers citizenship on visitors, he argued.
“Both the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to anyone born and resident in the United States, regardless of race,” Thomas wrote to himself and Justice Neil Gorsuch. “Neither guaranteed citizenship to anyone without a domicile in the United States.”
Unlike temporary visitors from other countries, blacks were Americans and therefore entitled to citizenship. “They had no other homeland, owed allegiance to no foreign power, and were not subject to any other authority,” he wrote. He also said the 14th Amendment had been “transferred into a political project that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
But Jackson, in a concurring opinion, hit on Thomas, saying Thomas had “recycled” the 14th Amendment and went along with the “abhorrent” Dred Scott decision in his agreement with Trump to deny citizenship to tourists and the children of illegal immigrants.
She argued that the 14th Amendment’s “universalist purpose” persists through past debates over whether children of Chinese or Roma immigrants should be considered citizens.
“The Reconstruction Amendment was an anti-caste, anti-subordination reset on the nation, more than just a spot-on cure for the dark stains of slavery,” she wrote, arguing that the minority opinion “pitches black Americans against immigrants, when the proponents of the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. Freed blacks fought for the humanity shared by all peoples.”
“Their conclusion is that for certain people, being born on American soil is not enough to confer citizenship,” Jackson wrote.
