{"id":466492,"date":"2026-02-13T15:33:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:33:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/466492\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T15:33:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:33:11","slug":"a-guide-to-some-of-the-briefs-in-support-of-ending-birthright-citizenship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/466492\/","title":{"rendered":"A guide to some of the briefs in support of ending birthright citizenship"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 1 in the challenge to President Donald Trump\u2019s executive order<\/a> seeking to end the guarantee of citizenship to virtually everyone born in the United States. Like another high-profile case argued earlier this term, involving the challenge to Trump\u2019s tariffs<\/a>, the dispute has thus far garnered a large number of amicus or \u201cfriend of the court\u201d briefs \u2013 18 in support of the Trump administration and one that, although theoretically in support of neither side, tends to favor the administration.<\/p>\n

I highlight some of the arguments made in the briefs supporting the Trump administration below. When the \u201cfriend of the court\u201d briefs supporting the challengers are all filed later this month, I will discuss those in a separate story.<\/p>\n

Several briefs focus on echoing or adding to the Trump administration\u2019s arguments on the text of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

The 14th Amendment provides that \u201c[a]ll persons born \u2026 in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.\u201d The Trump administration\u2019s argument centers on the idea<\/a> that to obtain citizenship at birth, you must be \u201csubject to the jurisdiction of the United States,\u201d which in turn means that you must be \u201ccompletely subject\u201d to this country\u2019s \u201cpolitical jurisdiction,\u201d \u201cowing it \u2018direct and immediate allegiance.\u2019\u201d The children of noncitizens who live only temporarily in the United States, the federal government contends, \u201cowe primary allegiance to their parents\u2019 home countries, not the United States\u201d and therefore are not covered by the 14th Amendment\u2019s citizenship clause.<\/p>\n

Law professor Ilan Wurman offers a closer look<\/a> at the rule in place in early English and U.S. history. He contends that, contrary to conventional wisdom, birthright citizenship was not universally available but was instead only available to the children of \u201cparents under the sovereign\u2019s protection. In exchange for that protection,\u201d he writes, \u201cthe parents owed the sovereign allegiance\u201d \u2013 a rule that \u201cis unlikely to have applied\u201d to the children of undocumented immigrants, whose parents would not have been under the sovereign\u2019s protection. And \u201cthe leading drafters of the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment,\u201d he says, \u201cappear to have presumed temporary visitors would be excluded\u201d from birthright citizenship because they were not subject to the \u201ccomplete jurisdiction\u201d of the United States.<\/p>\n

Another law professor, Richard Epstein<\/a>, points to the laws that governed the naturalization of U.S. citizens around the time of the adoption of the 14th Amendment to support the argument that the phrase \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d of the United States does not apply to the children of undocumented immigrants. Under those laws, Epstein contends, someone who wanted to become a naturalized U.S. citizen \u201chad to take an oath renouncing all loyalties to any foreign sovereign\u201d; the children of a naturalized citizen would only then become U.S. citizens as well. \u201cBecause \u2018subject to the jurisdiction thereof\u2019 excludes individuals born owing allegiance to a foreign country,\u201d Epstein asserts, \u201cthe phrase excludes children born to illegal immigrants. Even the most precocious newborn babies cannot renounce foreign ties. Only their parents can. And illegal aliens, by definition, have not done so,\u201d Epstein concludes.<\/p>\n

Epstein adds that the Supreme Court\u2019s 1898 decision in the case of Wong Kim Ark<\/a>, holding that the U.S.-born son of Chinese parents was a U.S. citizen, was \u201cwrongly decided.\u201d \u201cPeople of Asian heritage\u201d he observes, \u201chad never been allowed to become naturalized citizens, and in fact did not gain that right for years\u201d after the court\u2019s ruling. \u201cIt is simply not plausible,\u201d he writes, \u201cthat Americans, when they ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, believed they were conferring automatic citizenship on the native-born children of individuals who, because of their race, were ineligible to apply for citizenship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese argues<\/a> that Trump\u2019s executive order limiting birthright citizenship is consistent with both legal scholarship and the practice of the executive branch in the wake of the ratification of the 14th Amendment. In support of this, he cites two cases in which the U.S. government concluded that children who were born in the United States to parents who did not have permanent residency in this country were not U.S. citizens.<\/p>\n

The Claremont Institute\u2019s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which describes itself as the \u201cpublic interest law arm of the Claremont Institute, whose stated mission is to restore the principles of the American founding to their rightful and preeminent authority in our national life,\u201d echoes Meese\u2019s arguments. This organization states in its brief<\/a> that \u201cThomas Cooley, perhaps the most prominent constitutional treatise writer of the era,\u201d wrote in 1880 that the phrase \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d did not include \u201cany qualified or partial jurisdiction, such as may consist with allegiance to some other government.\u201d Moreover, the group adds, the adoption of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924, which made clear that all Native Americans born in the United States are U.S. citizens, \u201cdemonstrates that Congress did not believe the Fourteenth Amendment had automatically conferred citizenship upon all Native Americans born within the United States after 1868, or that Wong Kim Ark had done so, either.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two briefs discuss the possible national security implications of the court\u2019s ruling.<\/p>\n

Joshua Steinman, who served on the staff of the White House National Security Council during the first Trump administration and now is the CEO of a cybersecurity firm, urges the justices<\/a> to consider national security concerns \u201cwhen interpreting the Constitution.\u201d He argues that Trump\u2019s executive order limiting birthright citizenship \u201cnot only removes an incentive for illegal immigration,\u201d but it also \u201cremoves birthright citizenship as an attractive alternative for American adversaries seeking to easily cultivate intelligence assets.\u201d Specifically, he suggests, foreign intelligence services could \u201csend an expecting mother to the United States, receive mother and baby on return, indoctrinate and train the child, and then send the individual back to the United States to engage in espionage activity\u201d that \u2013 because the individual was a U.S. citizen \u2013 would be much more difficult for U.S. intelligence services to detect.<\/p>\n

A brief from Sen. Ted Cruz<\/a>, a Republican from Texas, and other members of Congress decries what he characterizes as the \u201cdire practical consequences\u201d from the so-called \u201cbirth tourism\u201d industry \u2013 the practice of pregnant women traveling to the United States as tourists to give birth so that their children will have U.S. citizenship. Cruz cites a study suggesting that during the past 15 years, \u201c\u2018at least 750,000 and possibly as many as 1.5 million\u2019 Chinese nationals have been born as U.S. citizens and are entitled to vote in any U.S. election of their choosing and move freely within our borders.\u201d According to Cruz, if the court decides against Trump\u2019s order, \u201cit will strip from Congress much of its power to prevent hostile nations from manufacturing nominal citizens\u2014persons who bear no allegiance to this country and who may even seek to subvert her interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

One brief concentrates on who should benefit from the district court\u2019s decision.<\/p>\n

In the case now before the Supreme Court, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante barred the Trump administration from enforcing the executive order against a class of babies born after Feb. 20, 2025, (the date the order was originally scheduled to go into effect) who are or would be denied citizenship by Trump\u2019s order.<\/p>\n

In a brief supporting neither side, law professor Michael Morley contends<\/a> that orders like Laplante\u2019s, which apply to a nationwide class, \u201craise many of the same concerns as the type of universal injunctions\u201d that the Supreme Court barred last year in Trump v. CASA<\/a>. \u201cRather than facilitating all-or-nothing litigation before a single district judge in which the rights of potentially millions of people across the nation are at stake,\u201d Morley writes, the Supreme Court \u201cshould instead consider potential alternatives,\u201d such as making district court rulings binding throughout the district in which they are issued, allowing others who are similarly situated but not litigants in a case to benefit, or limiting orders that benefit classes to the circuit in which they are issued, rather than making them nationwide.<\/p>\n

Cases: Trump v. Barbara (Birthright Citizenship)<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tRecommended Citation:
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tAmy Howe,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tA guide to some of the briefs in support of ending birthright citizenship,
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSCOTUSblog (Feb. 13, 2026, 9:30 AM),
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\thttps:\/\/www.scotusblog.com\/2026\/02\/a-guide-to-some-of-the-briefs-in-support-of-ending-birthright-citizenship\/\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on April 1 in the challenge to President Donald Trump\u2019s executive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":466493,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-466492","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-united-states-of-america","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","14":"tag-us","15":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=466492"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/466492\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/466493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=466492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=466492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=466492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}