The Supreme Court Decides for Trump on Birthright Citizenship

Trump upended 125 years of settled law by fiat, stripping U.S. citizens of their rights. Now he can deport them to foreign countries.

Image: Adobe Stock.

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Today is the last day in the Supreme Court’s current term, and they just decided the first and most important of the six issues remaining in the term. There’s a reason Chief Justice Roberts leaves these to the last day: these most pertinent of all issues are dropped, and then the conservative justices whose weight is outsized and largely against the will of the American public just blow Dodge, leaving the damage done and the rage unheard.

Birthright Citizenship

Simply put, birthright citizenship is the policy of settled law that if a person is born on American soil, whether the baby’s parents are in the country legally or not, the person has inviolable citizenship in the United States. For 125 years, the United States has declared that anyone born here, with few detracting circumstances, is automatically a citizen of the United States whose rights as an American cannot be abrogated for any reason.

But Donald Trump had other ideas. Since many people who are birthright citizens are children of migrants—and many of them not white—one of Trump’s ideas was to deny birthright citizenship to children of people in the country illegally. He’s also tried to take the citizenship possibilities from Dreamers, threatening the deportation of people who were brought to the United States as babies or small children and have no memory of their birth countries. It’s also occurred to some people that he may not stop there and declare children of even legal immigrants as having illegal status.

The History of the Right (from WHAS Louisville):

Birthright citizenship automatically makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally. The right was enshrined soon after the Civil War in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

In a notable Supreme Court decision from 1898, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the court held that the only children who did not automatically receive U.S. citizenship upon being born on U.S. soil were the children of diplomats, who have allegiance to another government; enemies present in the U.S. during hostile occupation; those born on foreign ships; and those born to members of sovereign Native American tribes.

The U.S. is among about 30 countries where birthright citizenship — the principle of jus soli or “right of the soil” — is applied. Most are in the Americas, and Canada and Mexico are among them.

The Case Goes to the Courts

When Trump started rattling this bloody saber, Democrats in three jurisdictions sued to block deportation orders. They won: the judges in these jurisdictions ruled against the Trump administration and declared nationwide stays and injunctions which stopped Trump in his tracks.

This isn’t something new: local judges issuing national injunctions have blocked both Democrat and Republican administrations’ rash actions for more than a decade while courts decided the issues. What’s at issue now is whether Congress, which is due for recess, can stop the national autocratic will of a president acting against settled law. With Republicans controlling both houses of Congress, the answer is no.

Now that lower-court rulings are nullified, tens of thousands of people who are now citizens of the United States will have their citizenship stripped from them by fiat, and they will be deported while Congress debates bills about whether their citizenship may be stripped. They will have to appeal their deportations from a foreign country they know nothing about and which may or may not accept them as citizens or even give them visas. This dilemma, of course, means very few of them will be successful in making their way through the red tape of either country to try to regain entry to the United States and come back to the only homes they have ever known.

The timing of this decision, at the end of the Supreme Court’s term and with Congress headed to recess, gives Trump everything he needs. Masked ICE agents can’t start rounding people up because Trump has used executive orders to gut the 125 years of settled law and the injunctions of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

This isn’t over. But by the time Congress takes up birthright citizenship and the courts take up the legality of Trump’s actions on a national-court level, many people’s lives will have been utterly gutted.

And if any of those actions occurs before the elections of 2026 have a chance to bring to the country back into some semblance of balance, what has been settled law for more than a century may be indefinitely reversed and irreparable damage may be done to the Constitution.