WASHINGTON, DC – If I am born on U.S. soil, am I automatically a citizen of that country?
That’s the question before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday, in response to President Donald Trump’s extraordinary efforts to change the country’s longstanding interpretation of the Constitution amid a broader, hardline pro-immigration movement.
Recommended stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Advocates challenging President Trump’s efforts to abolish so-called birthright citizenship, under which infants born in the United States become U.S. citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status, want to submit what they see as a trial case to a nine-judiciary panel of the country’s highest court.
“This is one of the biggest issues for American society,” said Aarti Kohli, who is scheduled to attend Wednesday’s hearing as executive director of the Asian Legislative Caucus, one of several groups that have raised the issue.
“It’s not just about what the executive order does, it’s about the president’s power to rewrite the Constitution.”
Advocates are not shying away from the difficult circumstances of this very important case. The lawsuit alleges that it risks transforming the cultural fabric of the United States, increasing the number of U.S. residents without equal rights, and creating a “permanent underclass” among some immigrant groups.
The bill will go to the U.S. Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority. The committee has handed President Trump some major defeats recently, but it largely leans in favor of the president on immigration issues.
“Every judge in the lower court ruled in our favor, regardless of which party appointed that judge,” Kohli said.
Trump Executive Order and the 14th Amendment
Wednesday’s case in the Supreme Court marks the culmination of months of challenges to an executive order signed by President Trump just hours after his inauguration on January 20, 2025.
The order sought to effectively abolish birthright citizenship, long interpreted as being established under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, three years after slavery was officially outlawed in the United States.
The amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court decision that held that black slaves born in the United States were not U.S. citizens.
Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, are nationals of the United States and of the state in which they reside.”
President Trump’s executive order asserted that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to universally extend citizenship rights to all persons born within the United States.” The group cited the phrase “subject to jurisdiction” to argue that the constitutional amendment does not apply to undocumented residents of the United States or those on temporary visas.
The order further states that “no department or agency” may issue or accept citizenship documents to individuals born to parents in these categories.
The executive order said it would take effect for anyone born within 30 days of signing, but its implementation has been widely blocked amid ongoing legal challenges.
What will the challengers claim?
At least 10 legal challenges to President Trump’s orders have been launched, but Trump v. Barbara is the first to be heard by the Supreme Court.
The lawsuit is named after one of the plaintiffs, a Honduran national named “Barbara.” She was living in New Hampshire in October 2025 and was pregnant with her fourth child while waiting for her asylum claim to be processed. Co-plaintiffs include a woman from Taiwan who was in the United States on a student visa and gave birth to a child in Utah in April 2025, and a Brazilian woman whose wife gave birth in March 2025.
Because the lawsuit is a class action, it is filed on behalf of all people in the same “class” as the plaintiffs: children who would be stripped of their citizenship by President Trump’s order.
Kohli, whose organization filed the lawsuit along with the ACLU, Legal Defense Fund and Democracy Defense Fund, said the arguments presented Wednesday will be relatively simple, saying Trump’s order directly contradicts the “clear language” of the 14th Amendment.
Lawyers will argue that a subsequent U.S. Supreme Court decision, United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, further confirmed that children born to noncitizen parents are U.S. citizens.
This concept was later codified in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which established that “all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction shall be nationals and nationals of the United States at the time of their birth.”
This practice was previously common law in England.
“If you look at the legislative history, it’s clear that Congress understood that to mean every child born in the United States. Nowhere in the Constitution or the (1952) law does it say anything about the domicile of the parents,” Kohli said.
“This is a very clear law,” she said.
She added that the phrase “subject to its jurisdiction” has long applied only to very narrow groups of individuals, such as children of foreign diplomats, children born to invading forces on U.S. territory, and children born on sovereign Native American territory.
Trump administration claims it was a “misreading”
Beyond President Trump’s executive order, Justice Department lawyers argue that more than a century of U.S. practice has been premised on a fundamental “misreading” of the U.S. Constitution.
In a court filing, they argued that the 14th Amendment was written for “newly freed slaves and their children, not the children of aliens or illegal aliens temporarily residing in the United States.”
Further, they argued that the Supreme Court’s decision in Ark only concerned noncitizens who “enjoy the right of permanent residence and residency” in the United States, which excludes some categories of people living in the United States.
Lawyers led by Attorney General John Sauer argued that the language of the 1952 law, which directly “grafted” the 14th Amendment, should also be reinterpreted.
Once considered an illegitimate viewpoint, this position broadly conforms to the arguments set forth in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy framework, which has influenced many of the Trump administration’s actions in its second term.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who is largely seen as the architect of the president’s hardline immigration policies, is the standard-bearer for the plan.
On Monday, President Trump again cheered the effort, appearing to pressure the Supreme Court justices (three of whom he appointed) to rule in his favor.
He said the United States is “laughing at how stupid the American court system has become.”
Underscoring its importance to the president, President Trump’s schedule on Wednesday included a stop at the Supreme Court. If he attends the Supreme Court’s oral argument, he will be the first sitting president to do so.
Intergenerational interests
Advocates say the stakes of the case before the Supreme Court should not be underestimated.
A joint analysis by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and the Pennsylvania Population Research Institute found that President Trump’s executive order will affect approximately 255,000 infants born in the United States each year.
That would increase the number of illegal aliens in the U.S., potentially without ties to other countries, for generations, the analysis found. That would “create a permanent, multigenerational underclass, where U.S.-born residents will eventually pass on the social disadvantages of their parents to their grandparents and great-grandparents.”
Kohli said the order would “create a permanent underclass if these children are not U.S. citizens” and that “the bureaucratic chaos would be unimaginable.”
She saw the effort as part of the Trump administration’s larger ambitions to reverse demographic changes in the United States, where white people remain a majority but have steadily declined in numbers over the years.
She added that the move is in line with President Trump’s push for widespread deportations, his efforts to block asylum claims, curtail legal immigration channels and significantly restrict the U.S. refugee program.
“Just as their enforcement goals are going after a wide range of immigrants, not just illegal immigrants, they are going after people with legal status and trying to create conditions so horrifying that those people will voluntarily leave,” Kohli said.
“The real goal is to prevent immigrants, especially immigrants of color, from obtaining citizenship,” she said.
