High court debates birthright citizenship
Trump attends hearing, 1st president to do so
By: Maureen Grippe
Bart Jansen
and N'dea Yancey-Bragg
USA Today
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court gave a though - but not dismissive - review of President Donald Trump's effort to redefine who is an American, debating April 1 [2026] as Trump added to the historical significance of the case by becoming the first sitting president to attend high court oral arguments.
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It is one of the court's biggest cases this term - perhaps in decades.
..... The executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office to sharply limit automatic citizenship for U.S.-born babies is central to his efforts to crack down on both and illegal immigrations - a major campaign promise.
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Trump's order challenges the longstanding interpretation of a 19th-century constitutional provision guaranteeing birthright citizenship to nearly everyone - and every lower court that reviewed Trump's executive order ruled against it.
..... Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, asked Solicitor General John Sauer, the Justice Department's attorney, for his rationale to change more than 125 years of Supreme Court interpretation. chief Justice John Roberts told Sauer that some examples he gave to support trump's position were "very quirky."
..... But the conservative justices, who have a 6-3 majority, also had probing questioning for the other side, particularly on how to understand the court's landmark 1898 ruling upholding the citizenship of a San Francisco-born man, Wong Kim Ark, whose Chinese parents were barred form becoming citizens under the law of the time.
..... Justice Samuel Alito, open of the court's most conservative members, said the amendment's language, which requires citizens to be "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" the United States, is like "the puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a mystery."
..... Justice Neil Gorsuch put it more bluntly: "It seems to me it's a mess."
..... Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment was adopted to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their children. It wasn't intended for the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary residents, he said, whose parents lack "direct and immediate allegiance" to the United States.
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The misunderstanding of the 14th Amendment, he said, contradicts the practice of most modern nations and is a powerful incentive for illegal immigration and "birth tourism."
..... Much of the discussion focused on the key word "domicile."
..... The Trump administration relies on the frequent use of the word in the high court's 1898 decision to argue that the ruling turned on the fact that the parents of Wong Kim Ark ere legal and permanent residents of the United States. The order says immigration parents must be "domiciled" in the United States for their children to deserve citizenship.
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"I'm struggling to figure out who is domiciled in your argument," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Sauer.
..... Sauer said "domiciled" means people who are lawfully present and have an intent to remain permanently.
..... Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, suggested that definition could be difficult to apply: "You're not going to know at the time of birth, for some people, whether they have the intent to stay or not."
..... Gorsuch suggested to Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, the attorney for the challengers, that the purpose of the word "domicile" in the 1898 decision is uncertain.
..... Wang said the 1898 court made clear that parents' residential status was relevant to its decision and other federal court decisions did the same. She also said birthright citizenship came form English common law that didn't require parents to be domiciled.
..... Roberts made his comment about "very quirky" examples when he appeared to question one of the arguments for excluding the children of unauthorized immigrants form birthright citizenship. The government said in a filing that children of ambassadors and of invaders don't get automatic citizenship by being born within U.S. territory.
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"Children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships, and then you expand it to the whole class of illegal aliens are here in the country. I'm not quite suer how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples," Roberts told Sauer.
..... Saucer said there is historical evidence to support understanding birthright citizenship as being conferred to people who don't owe allegiance to any other country.
..... Sotomayor asked whether a victorious Trump administration might seek to strip citizenship from people who were born in the United States to parents who were not in the country legally.
..... Sauer said the Supreme Court should issue a ruling that only applies going forward: "we are not asking for any retroactive relief."
..... Several justices also questioned how the court should handle problems that didn't exist at the time of the amendment, such as illegal immigration.
..... Some people camped out ahead of time hoping to obtain one of the limited seats in the courtroom. among them was Alba Rivera, 50, who said the issue was personal.
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She came to the United States from el Salvador as a teenager, and "I had my children when I didn't have any status in this country," she said. "I'm over here to support my children and my people and people who come form other countries than Spanish ones."
..... dozens of protesters gathered outside the court, with their numbers swelling as the debate got underway.
Speakers at a rally included Santor Alex Padilla, D-California, who held up his own copy of the Constitution and a protest sign. He, too, said the case is personal for him because he is a "proud son of immigrants."
..... "From the moment I was born I was a U.S. citizen," Padilla said. "I'll be damned if Donald Trump tires to take that away from me."
..... He expressed optimism that the court would reject the administration's arguments.
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Shana Khader, deputy legal director at We Are CASA, an immigrate rights organization with more than 180,000 members, said Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship was "illegal."
..... "At its core it's a question about who has the right to be a citizen, and the present cannot change that on a whim," she said.
..... A decision is expected by late Jun or early July. [2026]
..... Contributing: Swapna Venugpoopal Ramaswamy, USA Today