For more than 150 years, the 14th Amendment has been an uncompromising line: If you are born on US soil, you are a citizen. That principle is so foundational, many of us take it for granted.

But that principle is under attack.

On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments challenging President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship. At the center of the case is an executive order issued on the first day of Trump’s second term to end Birthright Citizenship for children of undocumented parents.

The justices will now decide whether a president can rewrite one of the clearest promises embedded in American law.

If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.

On the surface, threatening the rights of children born in the United States might seem like an immigration debate. But history tells a different story.

Birthright citizenship was never an abstract ideal. It was a response to America’s long history of dehumanization—a past that Trump and his MAGA allies are now openly trying to resurrect. The 14th Amendment was designed to dismantle a system that denied Black people a political voice, treated us as property, and denied our humanity.

Ratified in 1868, the amendment overturned Dred Scott v. Sandford, which declared that Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Birthright citizenship was meant to be simple and permanent so no government could take it away based on race, ancestry, or political whim.

For formerly enslaved people and their descendants, it guaranteed recognition as full citizens in their own country. But the 14th Amendment did more than correct the injustices of slavery: It expanded who counts as American.

The Constitution says plainly that anyone born in the United States and subject to its laws is a citizen. That principle was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which ruled that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a citizen, establishing that US-born children of immigrants are citizens. This was despite the fact that Chinese immigrants at the time were barred from naturalization under the Chinese Exclusion laws.

The case now before the court seeks to undo that understanding.

If the court strikes down birthright citizenship, it would let the government decide who counts as American based on the circumstances of their birth.

The 14th Amendment’s authors understood the........

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