When my grandfather fled Nazi Germany, he carried with him, across multiple borders, an unwavering faith that the future was waiting on the other side. What he found was larger than any one man’s journey to safety: the American commitment to each person born on this soil that they belong.

This commitment, alongside my grandfather’s extraordinary courage to dream, meant that his son — my father — would be fully American. And I, a granddaughter he did not yet know, would be as well.

Birthright citizenship is one of the Constitution’s most fundamental guarantees: that every child born in the United States is a citizen of the United States, entitled to all the rights of every other citizen regardless of how or where their American story began. This week, when the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara to affirm the 14th Amendment, many people cried tears of relief and cheered that the fight had been won.

But winning a battle that should never have been fought in the first place robs the victory of some measure of its glory. The fact that a challenge to such a fundamental principle of the Constitution was able to reach the highest court in the land, and be denied by a worryingly close 6-3 margin, is a stark reminder that the very foundations of this nation, and the values underpinning it, are under attack, and that we must never take them for granted.

Now is not the time for complacency. Not while a small yet powerful group of people loudly question whether children born on this soil belong to it. And not after years of political efforts to cast Jews, Muslims, immigrants, refugees, LGBTQ people and........

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