The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments last week about birthright citizenship. If current guidelines are overturned, potentially hundreds of thousands of Black and Brown immigrants could be denied as American citizens from now on.
“All of us born in this country are Americans, as guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. That is the principle we defended before the United States Supreme Court,” said Cecillia Wang, national legal director for the ACLU, who argued the case before the court on April 1. “I left the courtroom thinking about my parents and so many families who came here seeking refuge, opportunity, and the American way of life. We couldn’t be more confident that this unlawful, un-American executive order will be struck down.”
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office last year that would deny birthright citizenship to all babies born in the United States after 2025 to parents without permanent legal status. This would widely affect many different groups, such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA or Dreamers), who are undocumented young adults with “lawfully present” status in the country. According to the Migration Policy Institute’s data, there are 500,000 active DACA recipients from countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras in the U.S as of 2025.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts, as well as the Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund, immediately filed a nationwide class action lawsuit, Barbara v. Trump, to block Trump’s order. Federal courts also blocked the order as unconstitutional based on the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in the Constitution in 1868 to give former Black enslaved people birthright citizenship as “whole” persons if they were males aged 21 and older.
Ashley Burrell, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, said the 14th Amendment was a direct repudiation of the infamous Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, which ruled that slaves were considered protected property and not people in 1857. Burrell added that there was an influx of Romani and Chinese immigrants to the U.S and the framers of the 14th Amendment argued about their status as citizens at the time.
“They were not only addressing the status of former slaves, but they were also seeking to remedy decades of injustice imposed on free people born in the United States, ensuring that free Black Americans — those who had never been enslaved — would also still be considered a citizen,” said Burrell. “Also to clarify that anyone, irrespective of color or background, if born on U.S. soil, would be a citizen.”
In an unprecedented move, Trump himself attended the opening arguments on April 1. He “slipped” into the public viewing section of the courtroom, stayed to hear his solicitor, and left shortly after Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson questioned the validity of the order and logistically how it would be carried out.
“Interestingly, some of the drawings weren’t actually, I think, fully accurate because he wasn’t way up front. He was probably a few rows back in the courtroom,” said Burrell. “I think it was so telling that he didn’t stay the entire time.”
Burrell said that they’re confident, based on questions from the justices and opening arguments, that the Supreme Court will uphold the 14th Amendment. She said the opposition’s argument that widespread “birth tourism” is a problem is not a reason to re-engineer the Constitution.
The case has two instances of legal precedent: United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898 and the Nationality Act of 1940, which finalized U.S citizenship status for all Native Americans.
“Birthright citizenship was affirmed in US v. Wong Kim Ark, when a Chinese American community challenged the idea that people like them could never fully belong. For Asian Americans, that history is deeply personal — it is a right we helped shape and defend,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, in a statement. “Trump’s executive order attempts to erase that legacy, denying families the dignity, stability, and belonging that the Constitution guarantees to every child born in this country. We’re fighting today to ensure that in our democracy, no president gets to re-define who is born a citizen and who is not.”
The Supreme Court is expected to make a final decision by the end of June or early July. Burrell confirmed that children born here are still currently protected by the Constitution in the meantime. “It is so sort of antithetical to a fundamental value of what it means to be American and what our forefathers and ancestors fought for, and so, again, I think that’s why we’re so hopeful that the right decision will come about,” said Burrell.
The 14th amendment was made for the babies of slaves back when it was made ,not for anybody in the world. The founders had no idea of what was coming that’s why the Constitution changes.