Washington DC – If you were born on United States soil, are you automatically a citizen of that country?
That’s the question that will be put before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday in response to President Donald Trump’s extraordinary effort to overturn long-held interpretations of the country’s Constitution amid a sweeping radical immigration campaign.
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Lawyers challenging Trump’s efforts to end so-called birthright citizenship — in which any infant born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status, becomes a concurrent U.S. citizen — expect to present an open-and-shut case before a nine-justice panel of the nation’s top court.
“This is one of the biggest issues for American society,” said Aarti Kohli, who will appear at Wednesday’s hearing as executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of several groups bringing the challenge.
“It’s not just about what the executive order does, it’s about the power the president has to rewrite the Constitution.”
Advocates have not shied away from the difficult context of the highly consequential case, which they say risks altering the cultural fabric of America, increasing the number of people living in the US who do not have equal rights, and creating a “permanent underclass” for some immigrant groups.
It will be brought before the US Supreme Court, dominated by a 6-to-3 conservative majority. The panel has handed Trump some big defeats recently, but it has largely leaned in the president’s favor on immigration.
“Every judge in the lower courts, regardless of which party has appointed that judge, has ruled in our favor,” Kohli said.
Trump’s executive order and the 14th Amendment
Wednesday’s case before the Supreme Court represents the culmination of a months-long challenge to an executive order signed by Trump just hours after taking office on January 20, 2025.
The order sought to effectively end birthright citizenship, long established under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which was ratified in 1868, three years after slavery was officially outlawed in the US.
The amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision, which held that black slaves born in America were not American citizens.
Instead, the 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s executive order argued that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to all persons born within the United States”. It highlighted the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to argue that the constitutional amendment does not apply to those living in the United States without documentation or on temporary visas.
If further ordered, “no department or agency” will issue or accept citizenship documents for persons born to parents in those categories.
The executive order says it will go into effect for people born 30 days after its signing, but its enforcement has been widely blocked amid ongoing legal challenges.
What arguments will the challengers make?
At least 10 legal challenges have been launched against Trump’s order, but Trump v. Barbara is the first challenge to be heard before the Supreme Court.
The case is named after one of the plaintiffs, “Barbara,” a Honduran citizen who was expecting her fourth child in October 2025 while living in New Hampshire while waiting for her asylum application to be processed. His co-plaintiffs include a Taiwanese woman – in the US on a student visa – who gave birth to a child in Utah in April 2025 and a Brazilian citizen, whose wife gave birth to the child in March 2025.
Because the case is a class action, it is brought on behalf of all people in the same “class” as the plaintiffs: children who would be denied citizenship under Trump’s order.
Kohli, whose organization took up the case with the ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund and the Democracy Defenders Fund, said the arguments made Wednesday will be relatively straightforward: Trump’s order directly contradicts the “clear language” of the 14th Amendment.
A subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision, 1898’s United States v. Wong Kim Ark, further confirmed that a child born to noncitizen parents was a U.S. citizen, lawyers would argue.
This concept was then codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which stated: “Persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof … shall be citizens and subjects of the United States at birth”.
This practice was previously English common law.
“If you look at the legislative history, it’s very clear that Congress understood this to mean any child who is born in the United States. Nowhere in the Constitution or the (1952) statute does it say anything about the domicile of the parents,” Kohli said.
“This is very clear established law,” she said.
The phrase “subject to its jurisdiction” has long been applied only to a very limited group of individuals, including children of foreign diplomats, people born into invading armies while on US soil, and people born on sovereign Native American territory, he said.
Trump administration’s claim ‘misread’
Beyond Trump’s executive order, Justice Department lawyers have argued that more than a century of US practice is based on a fundamental “misinterpretation” of the US Constitution.
In court filings, he argued that the 14th Amendment was drafted “for newly freed slaves and their children, not for the children of aliens who are temporarily present in the United States or for illegal aliens”.
He further argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in the Ark case only pertains to non-citizens “enjoying permanent domicile and residence” in the US, which, he said, bars certain categories of people from living in the country.
Lawyers, led by Solicitor General John Sawyer, argued that the language of the 1952 law, which is directly “transplanted” from the 14th Amendment, should also be reinterpreted.
While once considered a fringe legal perspective, this position largely follows the logic laid out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy framework, which has informed much of the work done during the Trump administration’s second term.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who is largely seen as the architect of Trump’s radical immigration policy, has been the standard bearer of the plan.
On Monday, Trump again praised the effort as he appeared to pressure Supreme Court justices — three of whom he appointed — to rule in his favor.
He said America is “laughing at how stupid our American court system has become”.
Underscoring the importance to the president, Trump’s Wednesday schedule featured him stopping at the Supreme Court. Sitting in on oral arguments at the top court would make him the first sitting president to do so.
generational stakes
Advocates say the risks of the case before the Supreme Court should not be underestimated.
A conjoint analysis The Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Penn State’s Population Research Institute found that Trump’s executive order would affect approximately 255,000 babies born in the US each year.
The analysis found that this would increase the number of undocumented individuals in the US, who would potentially have no ties to other countries for generations; This would create “a self-perpetuating, multi-generational underclass – in which US-born residents will inherit the social disadvantages borne by their parents and even, over time, their grandparents and great-grandparents”.
Kohli said, “If these children were not American citizens this order would create a permanent underclass”, and the bureaucratic chaos would be unimaginable.
He saw the effort as part of a larger ambition of the Trump administration: to stem the demographic shift in the US, where the white population remains the majority even as the proportion has steadily declined year over year.
He said the move was in line with Trump’s massive deportation campaign, his efforts to block asylum claims, curtail legal immigration pathways and severely restrict the US refugee program.
“Just as their enforcement agenda is going after a wide range of immigrants, not just undocumented immigrants, they’re going after people with lawful status and trying to create such a horrific situation that those people will self-deport,” Kohli said.
“The goal is really to prevent immigrants, especially immigrants of color, from obtaining citizenship,” he said.
