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The Supreme Court Absolutely Shredded Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Case

But this also begs the question: why is this facially unconstitutional case before the court in the first place?

Demonstrators rally in support of birthright citizenship outside the Supreme Court on April 1, 2026.

On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s executive order challenging birthright citizenship got its day at the Supreme Court. In honor of the occasion—or, more likely, in a foolish attempt at intimidating his handpicked justices—Trump briefly attended oral arguments, marking the first time in recorded history that a sitting president has come to a Supreme Court hearing.

The case pits Trump’s deeply held anti-immigrant bigotry against the clear language of the 14th Amendment and nearly 130 years of Supreme Court precedent. At its heart is the question of whether the president can change the meaning of the Constitution to prevent children born on US soil to undocumented immigrants and temporary travelers from being citizens. It’s the highest-profile case of the court’s term—and Trump got crushed. He will not lose 9–0, as he should. His crusade against immigrants and their children will continue in other forms. But I believe Trump will lose this case. And given the Republican and MAGA-aligned composition of the Supreme Court, that will have to be enough for now.

The case is called Trump v. Barbara—with “Barbara” being a pseudonym for a plaintiff represented by the ACLU who challenged Trump’s executive order. The ACLU’s argument is simple: Birthright citizenship is conferred on all people who are born within the territory of the United States by virtue of the 14th Amendment. The first sentence of the first section of that 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.”

This is all the evidence the plaintiffs need. Pointing to this clause of the 14th Amendment is like Tom Brady responding to the question “Were you a good quarterback?” by pointing to the Super Bowl rings on his fingers. Still, the plaintiffs have even more law on their side if they want it: a 1898 case by the name of United States v. Wong Kim Ark. In that case, the citizenship of a child born in the United States to Chinese-American parents was challenged. The court ruled that the child was a citizen because he was born in San Francisco, which is where his parents were living at the time of his birth. In terms of birthright citizenship, that case should be game, set, match.

In response, the Trump administration, as represented by US Solicitor General John Sauer, made a series of wild arguments steeped in bigotry and xenophobia. First, the administration argued that the 14th Amendment was a narrow, time-specific intervention that applied only to the enslaved people freed by the Civil War. While it is true that the 14th Amendment directly overturned the Dred Scott decision (which held that no slave—and, indeed, no Black person—could become a citizen), the text, which I just quoted for you, makes it unequivocally clear that Trump and Sauer are wrong. It does not say, “All formerly enslaved persons”; it says, “All persons.”

Next, the Trump administration tried to get around the obvious implications of the Wong Kim Ark ruling by arguing that it applied only to children born to parents who are either “domiciled” in the United States or who owe “allegiance” to the United States. In court, Sauer argued that undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors can never be lawfully “domiciled” in the US nor owe allegiance to this country, and therefore their children cannot be citizens.

This argument is bollocks. During oral arguments, six of the justices ripped it apart.

The ripping started almost immediately, with Chief Justice John Roberts telling Sauer that the sources he was using as evidence were “quirky.” Justice Elena Kagan followed up by observing that Sauer was using some “pretty obscure sources.” Roberts and Kagan were actually being nice; those “sources” were not merely “quirky” and “obscure”; they were the writings of straight-up white supremacists who tried to undermine the 14th Amendment by arguing openly for a white ethno-state where Chinese Americans could never be citizens. Sauer relied in particular on the work of Alexander Porter Morse, a white supremacist lawyer who argued Plessy v. Ferguson on behalf of........

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