Trump seeks to redefine who gets to be an American with birthright citizenship case | US supreme court

It was a surreal morning at the US supreme court.

For more than two hours, the nation’s highest court considered arguments over whether Donald Trump could, through an executive order, shatter an idea fundamental to the story and course of the United States: that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen.

The U.S. president himself was in the room — he was the first president to participate in oral arguments on the court — facing the justices he had long berated and pressured to comply with his agenda. His participation was a striking sign of how important this cause was.

The egalitarian, universal rule that everyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen was included in the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution in 1868 and was upheld by the supreme court 128 years ago. A decision in favor of the Trump administration would catastrophically redefine what it means to be an American.

In practical terms, this means that approximately 250,000 babies born in the United States each year will be stripped of their citizenship. Some would become stateless. Legal experts warn that this outcome could lead to the stripping of citizenship of millions of people who already have citizenship.

The final decision is expected in June, and following the conclusion of oral arguments, a majority of the justices were skeptical of Trump’s efforts to curtail his birthright citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts said at one point that he found the administration’s evidence that the 14th amendment was not generally enforced “very interesting.” Justice Elena Kagan said the administration’s legal representative, attorney general John Sauer, was “looking for a more technical, esoteric meaning” in the citizenship clause.

But the court’s conservative justices also questioned Cecillia Wang, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union; which led to a legal challenge to Trump’s decision; This raised the possibility that the details of this decision could be legally complex and could have far-reaching consequences regardless of the overall outcome.

The debates also raised troubling questions about who should and should be considered American.

It became clear how Trump might answer these questions as he arrested and displaced families who had lived in the United States for decades, launched a mass deportation campaign, and moved to sharply restrict pathways to legal citizenship.

But most Americans support birthright citizenship. And many Americans—including those in the nation’s highest positions of power—owe their family trajectory to this principle.

Justice Alito brought up language in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 enacted after the abolition of slavery and I offered a template The 14th amendment allows a person born in the United States and “not subject to any foreign power” to obtain birthright citizenship. He put forward a hypothesis about a child born in the United States to an undocumented immigrant from Iran who would become an Iranian citizen at birth. “Is it not subject to any foreign power?” Alito asked.

Wang said no. Moreover, “this means that the children of Irish and Italian immigrants cannot become citizens either,” he noted. What it doesn’t say clearly is that the judges own family stories It was profoundly shaped by the US principle of birthright citizenship. Alito, the only first-generation American on the Supreme Court, was born in Italy and came to the United States as a baby and was naturalized at age 10. His colleague Roberts’ grandfather was born in the United States to parents from Slovakia who were not naturalized citizens at the time. based on New York Times research. Judge Clarence Thomas’s great-grandfather became a U.S. citizen following the ratification of the 14th amendment, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants.

Sauer relied on the extreme conservative argument that the 14th amendment was intended to apply only to “newly freed slaves and their children, not the children of aliens or illegal aliens temporarily present in the United States.”

Wang, who was born in Oregon after his parents legally immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan as graduate students, cited sweeping evidence of the long-held interpretation of the 14th amendment’s citizenship guarantees as broad-ranging to all by birth.

After arguments ended, Wang told reporters: “I leave the court today with the thoughts of my family and many of our parents and ancestors.”