Members of the media gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court ahead of President Donald Trump’s expected arrival on April 1, 2026. The court heard oral arguments that day in a case seeking to determine whether Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional. (Photo: Al Drago/Getty Images)
When the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments last week on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, Justice Sonia Sotomayor seemed skeptical.
The written order only applies to children born in the future, and the Trump administration has asked the court to exclude current citizens from any decision. Still, the court’s senior liberal justice wasn’t sure it would end that way.
“But the logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president or the next president or Congress or someone else may decide that this should not be a forward-looking measure,” Sotomayor told U.S. Attorney General D. John Sauer, the government’s lead defender in court. – According to your theory, nothing would stop it.
The case of citizenship by birth, Trump v. Barbaraforces the Supreme Court to confront the prospect that the United States will become a very different kind of nation – one in which Americans risk losing their citizenship and children may be born effectively stateless. It is also a nation that would more closely resemble its past, when immense swathes of people were excluded from the coveted title of American.
A majority of the court, including several conservative justices, he seemed unconvinced the Trump administration’s argument that the 14th the constitutional amendment ratified during Reconstruction did not guarantee citizenship to almost anyone born on American soil. The court may well overturn the order, which never came into force, later this year.
Regardless of the decision, the case has sparked a fierce debate about what constitutes an American – and the implications of that definition – that is unfolding in the courtroom, in court documents and on the steps of the Supreme Court.
“Citizenship by birth is not just a legal principle,” Norman Wong said during a demonstration outside the Supreme Court last week.
Wong is the grandson of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco but was refused repatriation after visiting China more than a century ago. Officials claimed at the time that he was not a citizen, but he took the case to the Supreme Court, which in an 1898 decision confirmed that virtually all children born in the United States were guaranteed citizenship.
“It’s a statement about who we are as a nation,” Wong said of his birthright citizenship. “It affirms that America is not defined by blood ties or exclusion, but by shared values and equal rights.”
Another view
Trump and some Republicans view birthright citizenship differently.
The Fourteenth Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized within the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”
The Trump administration, which has worked on mass deportations, maintains that children born to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily are not subject to that country’s jurisdiction. Most historians and lawyers reject this position.
The executive order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office, calls citizenship a privilege, not a right, that is a “priceless and profound gift.”
At a recent Oval Office event, Trump told reporters that birthright citizenship is intended to extend citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children after the Civil War.
“The reason was because it had to do with slave children,” Trump said.
Some Republicans have embraced the concept of the United States as a nation bound by a distinct cultural heritage — sometimes in language celebrating European settlers — as opposed to a nation united by the American idea or a set of shared principles. Like Trump, they support a restrictive approach to immigration.
At a conference on national conservatism – as this perspective is sometimes given – at a conference on national conservatism – U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, Republican from Missouri, called America “a way of life that is ours and ours alone, and if we disappear, then America will also cease to exist.”
In January, Schmitt joined Republican Chip Roy of Texas in filing a challenge to the Supreme Court, affirming the ruling.
“The citizenship clause applies only to those who have been permitted to make our country their permanent and lawful home,” he added he says briefly.
Take away citizenship?
Last week at the Supreme Court, Sotomayor pressed Sauer about the Supreme Court’s 1923 decision in U.S. v. Thind. In that case, judges ruled that a Sikh from India, Bhagat Singh Thind, was ineligible for citizenship.
Thind argued that he was a “free white man,” a category of people who could naturalize under federal law at the time. The court found that Thind did not meet this definition as the phrase is commonly understood. Following this decision, the federal government revoked the citizenship of dozens of South Asian Americans.
Sauer reiterated that the Trump administration was only asking for “potential aid,” prompting Sotomayor to interject.
“No, I’m telling you, yes, that’s what you’re asking for relief right now,” Sotomayor said. “I’m asking whether the logic of your theory would allow for what happened after the Thind court decision, that the government could proceed to denaturalize people who were born here to illegal residents.”
Sauer replied “no” before stating that “we are not asking for any retroactive relief.”
During the exchange, attention was drawn to the scenario that many immigrant supporters fear, if the Supreme Court takes away their birthright citizenship.
In a court filing, the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at the University of California, the Irvine School of Law, which uses litigation to advance racial justice, and more than 70 other nonprofit organizations warned that maintaining the order would incentivize efforts to revoke the citizenship of countless Americans.
While the order is styled as forward-looking, groups said it risks much deeper harm. To uphold Trump’s ruling, the Supreme Court would have to find that birth on U.S. soil does not guarantee citizenship. Once that happens, they argue, “it is too easy to imagine the government retroactively stripping people of citizenship.”
“In such a scenario, without further congressional intervention, affected individuals would lose their documents and many or most of them would become stateless,” he added. he says briefly.
The national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Cecillia Wang, in opposing the Supreme Court’s order, stated that the 14th the amendment provided a “steady bright line” on citizenship that contributed to the growth and flourishing of the nation.
She warned that the order would render entire areas of American law meaningless.
“Thousands of American children will immediately lose their citizenship,” Wang said. “And if the government’s theory is to be believed, the citizenship of millions of Americans – past, present and future – could be questioned.”
Ariana Figueroa contributed to this report.
