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As the Supreme Court has finally moved toward looking at the merits of President Donald Trump’s attempts to end birthright citizenship, the famous Wong Kim Ark case of 1898 has loomed particularly large.* While that precedent certainly bolsters the case for striking down Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, there is an often-ignored series of cases from much more recently that speak even more directly to the issues in this case. That story of 120,000 Americans stripped of their citizenship by the federal government, between 1946 and 1967, led ultimately to a unanimous Supreme Court conclusion that being born in the United States from foreign parents, documented or not, makes you American. These forgotten cases light the path to the current court decision on birthright citizenship this spring.

Just after World War II, the U.S. government started to implement the provisions of the Nationality Act of 1940 that allowed the federal government to deprive Americans—native-born and naturalized alike—of their citizenship for reasons like voting in a foreign election, joining a foreign army, remaining for six months or longer within any foreign state of which they or either of their parents have been a national, or for evading the draft. Starting in 1945 and continuing until 1967, between 1,000 and 8,000 Americans were stripped of their nationality each year. This practice only ended when the Supreme Court declared these provisions unconstitutional in the 1967 case Afroyim v. Rusk.

Of those stripped of citizenship before that ruling—totaling more than 120,000—a majority were native-born. Some of those affected challenged their loss of citizenship by appealing to the courts. Nine such cases reached the Supreme Court between 1955 and 1967. These cases were among the court’s most divisive, each spurring a........

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