By: Yannie Gia-Nhi Hoàng
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed an Executive Order regarding birthright citizenship stating that, in order to be considered a U.S. citizen, a person must have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident. The Executive Order is a significant shift in how birthright citizenship has been applied in the United States over the past 150 years.
According to the Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Fourteenth Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” including children of noncitizens. Additionally, the president does not have the authority to change the citizenship rule. Only Congress can change the rule, but solely to broaden it.
Since January, multiple federal judges have blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship Executive Order. Twenty-two states have sued to challenge this Order.
What is birthright citizenship?
In 1857, the Supreme Court upheld slavery and denied citizenship to Black Americans in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case. After slavery was abolished, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment which 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.” These measures guaranteed citizenship to “formerly enslaved people and free Black residents who had never been enslaved but hadn’t been considered citizens in their states or by the Supreme Court,” as well as their descendants.
When Chinese immigrants arrived on the West Coast, the Supreme Court then decided in the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark case that birthright citizenship would extend to Chinese people and all other races.
Birthright citizenship is a legal principle that automatically grants citizenship at time of birth. The U.S. uses “a combination of unrestricted birthplace-based citizenship (jus soli), granting citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil, […] and restricted ancestry-based citizenship (jus sanguinis), extending citizenship to children born abroad to U.S. citizens.” More than 30 countries practice automatic “jus soli” without restriction in almost all cases.
History and Supreme Court precedent “confirm an intent to grant citizenship to anyone born in the U.S.—regardless of their parents’ legal status,” according to Gerald Neuman, the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School.
What is the impact of birthright citizenship?
The main purpose of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment is to prevent individuals from becoming victims of exploitation that could result from the lack of protection granted to citizens, according to Neuman. It also serves to quickly integrate the first generation born in the United States into American society.
Trump’s Executive Order aims to end birthright citizenship by denying citizenship to children born to either “an undocumented immigrant mother and a father who is not a U.S. citizen or green card holder” or “a mother with a temporary status, such as on a student, work, or tourist visa, and a father who is not a U.S. citizen or green card holder.” Individuals born after February 19th, 2025, would be denied citizenship because their parents are in the country illegally. They would also not receive U.S. passports, social security numbers, or birth certificates from U.S. agencies.
According to a study from the Migration Policy Institute, ending birthright citizenship for U.S. babies with two unauthorized immigrant parents would increase the existing unauthorized population by 4.7 million people by 2050. One million of them would actually be children of two parents who were born in the United States, but whose birthright citizenship would not be recognized.
While Trump claims that the Executive Order would control “illegal immigration,” repealing birthright citizenship risks creating a self-perpetuating class that would be excluded from social membership for generations. Children of immigrants in countries without birthright citizenship have limited access to services such as healthcare, education, and social inclusion. And, if both parents are from countries without birthright citizenship, the children end up with no citizenship and become stateless.