{"id":552145,"date":"2026-03-29T10:39:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-29T10:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/552145\/"},"modified":"2026-03-29T10:39:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-29T10:39:09","slug":"supreme-court-fight-over-birthright-citizenship-threatens-chaos-in-proving-newborns-status","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/552145\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court fight over birthright citizenship threatens \u2018chaos\u2019 in proving newborns\u2019 status"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Justice Brett Kavanaugh sounded like a fired-up prosecutor last year as he shot off a withering series of nuts-and-bolts questions about how President Donald Trump would carry out his plan to rewrite of the way birthright citizenship has been understood<\/a> in the United States for more than a century.\n <\/p>\n

\n Would hospitals have to change the way they process newborns? Kavanaugh demanded<\/a>. Would state governments have to do something different? How would federal officials determine citizenship if a birth certificate no longer sufficed?\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cFederal officials will have to figure that out essentially,\u201d US Solicitor General D. John Sauer managed to say amid a fusillade of rapid-fire queries.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHow?\u201d Kavanaugh pressed.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSo, you can imagine a number of ways \u2014\u201d Sauer began.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cSuch as?\u201d Kavanaugh interjected.\n <\/p>\n

\n As the Supreme Court prepares<\/a> to consider the merits of Trump\u2019s executive order ending birthright citizenship on Wednesday, most of the same practical questions Kavanaugh raised a year ago remain unanswered. Some of those questions speak to the bureaucratic nightmare that Americans \u2014 including US citizens \u2014 might face documenting a child\u2019s immigration status. Others go to the very heart of what it means to be a US citizen.\n <\/p>\n

\n Most of the court\u2019s arguments this week will deal with the history of the 14th Amendment\u2019s citizenship clause<\/a>, which makes clear that \u201call persons born\u201d in the United States who are \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d are citizens. Written arguments from both Trump and the groups challenging the policy focus heavily on what the framers meant by \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d of the United States.\n <\/p>\n

\n Buried beneath that theoretical debate is uncertainty about how Trump\u2019s order, which he signed on the first day of his second term, would be implemented if the 6-3 conservative Supreme Court lets it take effect. Kavanaugh\u2019s inquiries last year suggested not only that Trump\u2019s idea was radical, but that it might also be unworkable.\n <\/p>\n

\n Federal agencies have rolled out a series of guidance documents<\/a> explaining how people would apply for passports, Social Security numbers and safety-net programs under Trump\u2019s plan. But some of those materials have raised as many questions as they\u2019ve answered.\n <\/p>\n

\n If allowed to take effect, the policy would create \u201ca tidal wave of legal confusion and chaos,\u201d predicted Jill Habig, the CEO of Public Rights Project, a nonprofit that provides legal support to state and local governments and that filed a brief in the case opposing the administration.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThis is the problem with trying to change hundreds of years of the constitutional text and precedent with what is essentially a memo,\u201d Habig said. \u201cEvery system that we have in this country to prove citizenship is typically based on just a birth certificate.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n When the high court delved into birthright citizenship last year, it was dealing with a technical issue about whether courts could halt a presidential directive on a short-term basis while it considered its legality. In late June, the court voted 6-3 to limit the ability of lower courts<\/a> to block such policies on a nationwide basis under a widely used procedure at the time. But the court left the door open to other avenues to pause such policies \u2014 like class-action suits \u2014 and Trump\u2019s birthright order was put on hold<\/a> again days later.\n <\/p>\n

\n But this time, the court will debate the legality of the order itself. A decision is expected by the end of June.\n <\/p>\n

\"Barbara,<\/p>\n

\n Kavanaugh is often highly deferential during oral arguments, but his animated back-and-forth with Sauer offered a window into the thinking of a key vote in the court\u2019s conservative wing. Trump\u2019s second Supreme Court nominee regularly sides with the administration, and he was in dissent when the court struck down Trump\u2019s emergency tariffs<\/a> earlier this year.\n <\/p>\n

\n In response to the blistering inquiries, Sauer said at the time that federal agencies would seek documentation from the parents of newborns to demonstrate \u201clegal presence in the country.\u201d For a person working in the US on a temporary basis, he said, the government could perhaps run a check on their name across government visa databases.\n <\/p>\n

\n But that, Kavanaugh noted, meant the government would have to run checks on the parents of more than 3.6 million babies<\/a> born in the United States each year.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cFor all the newborns?\u201d Kavanaugh fired back. \u201cIs that how it\u2019s going to work?\u201d\n <\/p>\n

Soil and blood<\/p>\n

\n Trump has insisted the executive order is aimed at combatting \u201cbirth tourism,\u201d immigrants who come to the United States briefly for the purpose of having a child.\n <\/p>\n

\n The 14th Amendment was adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, the administration has said, not people temporarily in the country illegally. And only since the court handed down a landmark precedent upholding the idea of birthright citizenship in 1898, the government says, has a \u201clatter-day misconception\u201d of the clause\u2019s scope taken hold.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat interpretation is untenable,\u201d the Department of Justice told the Supreme Court.\n <\/p>\n

\n And, it says, it has \u201cincentivized illegal entry into the United States and encouraged \u2018birth tourists\u2019 to travel to the United States solely to acquire citizenship for their children.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n But if allowed to take effect, Trump\u2019s order would have an impact far beyond the people it ostensibly targets. Critics say it would fundamentally change the meaning of US citizenship from a concept that is tied to geography to one that is linked instead to parentage. And that, they say, is a sharp departure from what the founding generation had in mind.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t view this birthright citizenship question in isolation. We should view it as part of the American experiment and the repudiation of continental ideas of bloodlines and lineage,\u201d said Vikram Amar, a University of California, Davis, School of Law professor who has written extensively on the issue. \u201cThe whole American experiment is about basing your opportunities and your future on who you are and what you make of your own equality rather than which family and which bloodline you were born into.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n After the Supreme Court ruled in the first birthright citizenship case last year, the Trump administration began making public a series of guidance documents<\/a> explaining the implementation of the order. Among those documents is\u202fone from the State Department<\/a>\u202fthat explains how officials would \u201crequest original proof of parental citizenship or immigration status\u201d to proceed with processing a passport application. To obtain a passport, in other words, a person born after the order took effect would need to document that their parents were citizens.\n <\/p>\n

\n To obtain a Social Security number, the agency would first check its own database for parents\u2019 records. One problem with that approach is that the Social Security Administration itself has acknowledged for years that potentially millions of its immigration records<\/a> are inaccurate, in part because the system relies on individuals to update their own records when their status changes.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s just not a system for demonstrating citizenship,\u201d Habig said. \u201cIt is a system for listing Social Security numbers, and that is not the same thing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Lower courts touched only briefly on the practical considerations of implementing the order, which were important mainly for establishing that the people challenging Trump had standing to sue. In July, a San Francisco-based federal appeals court upheld a Seattle judge\u2019s ruling that blocked Trump\u2019s policy nationwide in a case brought by a group of Democratic-led states. A separate decision earlier that month by a New Hampshire judge barred enforcement of Trump\u2019s order against any babies who would be impacted by the policy in a class-action lawsuit.\n <\/p>\n

\n Trump appealed both rulings to the Supreme Court, but the justices agreed to hear arguments in only the New Hampshire case.\n <\/p>\n

\n Despite the anxieties that have cropped up over implementation the president\u2019s order, the Trump administration notes that plenty of other countries have a similar system in place. Sauer is likely to raise that point when he returns to the Supreme Court on Wednesday.\n <\/p>\n

\n The early American view of birthright citizenship drew heavily from the United Kingdom\u2019s approach, which granted near-universal citizenship to babies born on English soil. But Trump\u2019s allies point out that changed in 1983 when the Brits abolished automatic birthright citizenship.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cHardly any developed country retains a rule of citizenship that resembles the United States\u2019 current approach,\u201d the administration told the Supreme Court.\n <\/p>\n

\n Critics counter that, in the case of the UK, Parliament enacted a law. Trump, by contrast, is attempting to change the meaning of birthright citizenship through executive order.\n <\/p>\n

\n And several briefs point out that the experience in the UK was far from smooth. Some of the same concerns groups are raising before the Supreme Court today were previously experienced overseas. Caribbean immigrants who moved to the UK after World War II by invitation from the government, or their children, struggled to prove their citizenship status in what became known as the Windrush scandal<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n

\n Under the 1983 law, those immigrants and their children were no longer able to prove citizenship with a birth certificate.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe theory may have appeared simple but the practice was brutal,\u201d a group called Reprieve said of the UK experience in a brief submitted to the Supreme Court in February. \u201cA system built on a bright-line rule gave way to one that bureaucracy could not administer, leaving people who had lived their whole lives as British unable to prove it on paper.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Justice Brett Kavanaugh sounded like a fired-up prosecutor last year as he shot off a withering series of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":552146,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-552145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552145","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=552145"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/552145\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/552146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=552145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=552145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=552145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}