Trump Is Gunning for Birthright Citizenship—and Testing the High Court

It is worth clarifying what exactly this means. The Trump administration would not be “ending” birthright citizenship by taking those steps. It would instead make it far more difficult for the children of undocumented parents to later prove that they are U.S. citizens if that citizenship is challenged in court. The Constitution, not the Department of Homeland Security, is what automatically makes people born on U.S. soil into American citizens.

The legal and constitutional reality is that Trump cannot actually end birthright citizenship on his own. But he seems keen on forcing a case that would potentially give the courts an opportunity to do it for him, perhaps through manipulating the documentary process. Succeeding would require the Supreme Court to rewrite the Fourteenth Amendment and overturn almost two centuries of precedents—something it’s already shown a willingness to do.

Any discussion of birthright citizenship begins with the most infamous case in Supreme Court history. Dred Scott, an enslaved Black man, sued for his freedom in federal court in 1853. He argued that because he had been taken to the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was not legal, he had thus become a free man upon his arrival there. The dispute reached the Supreme Court four years later in 1857.