The question landed like a gut punch on Friday morning: What, exactly, makes someone American? Not in some abstract, patriotic sense, but legally, constitutionally, fundamentally. When the Supreme Court announced it would hear the President’s challenge to birthright citizenship, it wasn’t just another case added to the docket. It was an existential examination of a 157-year-old promise written into the nation’s founding charter after the Civil War.
And on CNN, host Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the two-time Peabody Award-winning journalist who helms The New York Times’ “The Interview,” posed this profound query to a panel grappling with what many legal experts consider settled law.
A Constitutional Showdown
Friday’s decision by the Supreme Court to take up the administration’s appeal marks a historic moment. The Court will decide whether the President’s executive order, issued on his first day back in office on January 20, can legally end automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily. Under the current executive order, children born more than 30 days after it was signed wouldn’t receive citizenship documents unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident.
The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, ratified in 1868, states plainly that all persons born in the United States are citizens. It was designed to overturn the Supreme Court’s shameful 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared that Black people whose ancestors were enslaved couldn’t be citizens. In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed this principle in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruling that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrant parents was a U.S. citizen. That precedent has stood for 127 years.
Every federal court that has examined the executive order has blocked it. A New Hampshire district court certified a nationwide class of babies who would be denied citizenship and issued a preliminary injunction protecting them. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals declared the order contradicts the plain language of the Constitution. Yet the administration, led by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, argues that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means children must bear allegiance to the United States, not just be subject to its laws.
The Panel’s Fundamental Question
Garcia-Navarro’s question to her panel cut through the legal technicalities to something deeper. If the Supreme Court upholds the administration’s position, it wouldn’t just change who gets a birth certificate. It would fundamentally redefine American identity itself. The ruling, expected by June, will determine whether being born on American soil still means you’re American, or whether citizenship now depends on your parents’ immigration paperwork.
The stakes are enormous. If implemented, the policy would require all parents, including U.S. citizens, to prove their immigration status just to obtain birth certificates or Social Security numbers for their newborns. Civil liberties groups warn this would inevitably lead to racial profiling based on names, appearance, or accent.
An American Exception Worth Defending
The United States is one of roughly 30 countries, including Canada and Mexico, that offer automatic birthright citizenship. While the White House argues this is out of step with most developed nations, that comparison misses a critical point. The U.S. has been a deliberate outlier since 1868. The 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship as bedrock, something upon which generations of Americans have built a modern, democratic, pluralistic society.
