Opinion

President Trump's birthright citizenship fight is about history, not hysteria

The Trump administration’s efforts to abide by the original public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment aren’t revisionist. They’re just restorative

By Amy Swearer Fox News

Published April 13, 2026 5:00am EDT

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Laying down the law on birthright citizenship

Paul Gigot interviews legal analyst John Yoo.

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From the moment President Trump issued his executive order on birthright citizenship, critics derided it with a litany of adjectives nearly as colorful as they were unwarranted.

It was racist. Ahistorical. Unprecedented. Un-American.

During oral arguments at the Supreme Court last week, Justice Elena Kagan appeared to add another pejorative to the catalogue: revisionist.

Kagan’s accusation was, to be sure, more professionally dressed than many of the others. But it’s equally erroneous.

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Solicitor General John Sauer wasted no time pushing back on Kagan’s characterization, which, in its specific context, was limited to the government’s contention that birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegally or temporarily present aliens remained an open question even after the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

Sauer pointed out the irony of Kagan’s characterization: the modern "consensus" that Wong Kim Ark settled these questions is the revisionist interpretation. The federal government only definitively adopted this view of Wong Kim Ark in the 1930s. And it did so at the prompting of a single senior State Department official who had earlier admitted in a law review article that his opinion was contrary to that of the........

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