The Supreme Court delivered a decisive blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to limit birthright citizenship, affirming in a 6-3 vote that the Constitution guarantees citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, which firmly rejected an executive order issued by Trump on the first day of his second term. This order aimed to deny citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents who entered the country illegally or were living and working here legally with temporary visas. The executive order never took effect, as every lower court judge who reviewed it concluded that it was blatantly unconstitutional.
The Historical Context of Birthright Citizenship
The decision underscores the broad terms defined by the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War. The amendment states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Trump has long argued that the provision was meant to apply only to former slaves and not to the entire world. However, this interpretation has not been embraced by the courts or legal norms for 160 years. Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion cited the court’s landmark ruling in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants. Wong Kim Ark challenged his denial of re-entry to the U.S. after visiting his family in China and won in the Supreme Court.
The Significance of the Wong Kim Ark Case
The 1898 ruling interpreted the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship, with limited exceptions. The only exception that exists today is for the children of foreign diplomats.
The decision in the Wong Kim Ark case has been widely accepted, even during periods of great hostility to immigrants. For instance, during World War II, when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in detention camps in the United States, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. Congress subsequently codified this legal understanding.
The ACLU’s Role and the Dissenting Opinions
The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case before the Supreme Court in April. She emphasized that the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent. “In America, we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you’re born in this country, we’re all American, all the same,” she stated.
Dissenting from Tuesday’s decision were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito.
This landmark ruling reaffirms the longstanding principle of birthright citizenship, ensuring that all children born in the United States are granted the fundamental right to citizenship, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
