As the end of the month approaches, the Supreme Court is staring down one of its most consequential rulings in recent years: the birthright citizenship case.
Formally listed on the docket as Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court case questions whether President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order denying birthright citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is in agreement with the 14th Amendment. The justices heard oral argument on April 1 in a two-hour hearing, and the ruling, expected at the end of the month or the very beginning of July, runs the risk of reshaping the very concept of what the U.S. has come to stand for, just days ahead of the 250th anniversary of its founding.
It goes without saying that this case challenges the bedrock of what it means to be an American. Never mind the looming questions of how far the systemic disinheritance of children of any recent immigrants could go should the court rule in favor of Trump, or even how far back is too far when seeking to dispossess people of citizenship in a land chock-full of people who aren’t exactly native to it.
As UCLA School of Law professor Hiroshi Motomura told Salon ahead of Trump’s inauguration in 2024, the challenge to birthright citizenship “is quite a bit more of a rethinking of what the country is even about.” It upends how the nation has historically seen itself — as a country of immigrants — and threatens to undermine the racial history of the U.S. that undergirds it.
“This is why this is so bedrock compared to other things that the Supreme Court is sometimes characterized for doing as being quite radical,” Motomura, also a faculty co-director of Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy, said at the time. “This goes way beyond overruling Roe v. Wade. I think that was a radical move, but this is no comparison.”
On President Trump’s first day of his second term, he signed an executive order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” that proclaimed that individuals born in the U.S. did not automatically receive citizenship if their parents’ legal status is insufficient, as in their visa is temporary or they’re undocumented. It instructed federal agencies against recognizing citizenship claims of a child born after Feb. 20, 2025, under two circumstances: “(1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
It’s important to note that the promise of America has only ever been accessible to certain demographics.
The order claims that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause had never been interpreted to grant birthright citizenship to such children because they are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. as described in the amendment. Before the Supreme Court, counsel for the Trump administration further argued that such language refers to “owing direct and immediate allegiance” to the country.
Three families challenged the executive order on behalf of themselves and others in their positions in federal court, arguing that it unlawfully strips their children of citizenship under the 14th Amendment and U.S. law. Last July, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of New Hampshire blocked the order from taking effect pending litigation and provisionally certified a nationwide class of children who the order would affect.
It’s important to note that the promise of America has only ever been accessible to certain demographics. Even those whose families migrated here seeking a “better life” can speak to how uneven the American dream materializes across class, race and country of origin. But amendments like the 14th, as well as prior Supreme Court decisions, have worked to expand the Constitution’s reach should the executive branch seek to enforce them.
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Alongside its sister provisions — the 13th and 15th Amendments — passed in the wake of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment served to (theoretically) confer upon newly freed African Americans equal rights and protections under the Constitution of the only homeland many of them had known, been born in and toiled in for generations. The entire point was to legally establish who was once three-fifths human as a whole and fully recognized American citizen.
In 1898, the Supreme Court further clarified the intention of the 14th Amendment in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark. The case revolved around Ark, a San Francisco-born child of Chinese immigrants who had lived in the U.S. for 20 years but were denied citizenship under The Chinese Exclusion Act. The justices ruled 6-2 that the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment automatically rendered him a citizen because he was born in the U.S., establishing the concept of “jus soli,” the citizenship of children born in the country to non-citizens.
During oral argument in April, even some of the conservative justices questioned Solicitor Gen. John Sauer’s argument against birthright citizenship.
“John Marshall Harlan, the great dissenter, who dissented in Wong Kim Ark and later gave a bunch of lectures, he posed the question about the sojourners,” Justice Neil Gorsuch said. “‘Suppose an English father and mother went down to the hot springs to get rid of the gout, and while there, they have a child, now back in England. Is that child a citizen of the United States born of the jurisdiction thereof by mere accident of birth?’ And he says, ‘Under Wong Kim Ark, he is.’ And he continues, ‘I was one of the minority, and, of course, I was wrong.’ Now, I’m sure that was tongue-in-cheek, but what do you do with that?”
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Though legal experts warn against predicting a ruling based on the court’s questioning at oral argument, the majority of justices’ apparent skepticism, at least, reads as a positive sign.
Over the decades, as the U.S. has grappled with and accepted its racial and ethnic diversity, schools first taught children that America was a “melting pot.” Then they taught America is a salad bowl, not a gummy admixture of everyone from everywhere, but rather a heterogeneous blend of colors, cultures and histories that come together to make the nation better than what it has been. The 14th Amendment is part of what made such visions — however idealistic — possible.
The president can’t unilaterally take that away, and the Supreme Court, especially if keeping with longstanding interpretations of the founding document, shouldn’t either.
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