The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s 6-3 opinion, according to NPR. The decision firmly denied the executive order that President Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It attempted to bar […]
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s 6-3 opinion, according to NPR.
The decision firmly denied the executive order that President Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It attempted to bar citizenship for children born on U.S. soil to parents who entered the country illegally or are living on temporary visas. The executive order never took effect because all judges who reviewed it said that it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Trump has argued that the constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship, but Chief Justice Roberts pointed, the men that added the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after the civil war, maintained a broad definition for citizenship on purpose, which rejected the views of those that wanted to limit it. Thus the fourteenth Amendment opens with the citizenship clause and reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Trump argued that the amendment was meant only for former slaves, and that it “wasn’t meant for the entire world to occupy the United States.” Trump’s interpretation has not been accepted by the courts nor the legal norms over the past 160 years. Chief Justice Roberts highlighted the court’s landmark ruling over the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark case that took place over a century ago. The plaintiff, Wong, was born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants, where his parents ran a business until they returned to China. At the time, there was no required documentation for immigrants entering the United States. At age 21 he visited his family in China, but when he returned to the United States, he was denied re-entry on the grounds that he was not a citizen. He challenged the denial, and in a 6-to-2 decision, the court ruled in favor of Mr. Wong because he was born in the United States and his parents were not “employed in any diplomatic or official capacity under the Emperor of China.”
By a 6-to-3 vote the justices said “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, meaning that all children born on U.S. soil are automatically granted citizenship — with three limited exceptions, only one of which exists today — for the children of foreign diplomats.
The decision of the United States v. Wong Kim Ark was so widely accepted that even during great hostility periods towards immigrants, birthright citizenship remained untouchable. Including when the Japanese had their newborn children, while held as enemies in detention camps in the United States, they too were granted citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. Congress, also, subsequently codified that legal understanding.
The American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Cecilia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued, in April before the Supreme Court, the birthright case. She said that the men that wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to bestow automatic citizenship on the children, not the parents, with the idea that “”in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you’re born in this country, we’re all American, all the same.”
Dissenting from Tuesday’s decision were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.
