Update, April 1, 2026: Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. Rewire News Group is circulating this story, originally published on December 13, 2024, again for the interest of our readers.

Update, April 1, 2026: Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. Rewire News Group is circulating this story, originally published on December 13, 2024, again for the interest of our readers.

Birthright citizenship has been back in the news after Donald Trump claimed during a recent Meet the Press interview that the United States is the only country with birthright citizenship—which is patently false—and that the very concept is “ridiculous.”

“If somebody sets a foot—just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two—on our land, congratulations, you are now a citizen of the United States of America,” Trump said. “Yes, we’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous.”

I’ve seen an alarming number of people, including law professors and pundits, downplaying Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship, claiming the 14th Amendment says what it says, and the only way to change it is through another constitutional amendment. That is a mistake considering it’s the Supreme Court that interprets the Constitution, and we can’t trust the six conservative jamokes on the Court to do anything other than what their Federalist Society overlords tell them to.

But first, let’s get into what birthright citizenship even is.

Birthright citizenship is a right guaranteed by the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. The 14th Amendment states “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Basically, the Citizenship Clause extends citizenship to anyone born on American soil.

It’s based on the concept of “jus soli,” which means “of the soil.” This type of citizenship isn’t the same as other forms of citizenship such as naturalization, which is granted to immigrants who are lawful permanent residents, or “jus sanguinis,” which means “of the blood.”

Birthright citizenship is not a new concept. The drafters of the 14th Amendment intended for the Citizenship Clause to supersede the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1857 opinion in Dred Scott v. Sanford, in which the Court held that Black people could never be American citizens because of their race. The 14th Amendment corrected that embarrassing analysis and extended........

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