Washington– One of the first things an Argentine immigrant did after giving birth to her son in Florida last year was get a US passport.
She saw the passport as concrete proof that he was an American. But now people like her are waging a legal battle over President Donald Trump Executive order That would Denied American citizenship For children born in the United States to people who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
“It’s funny because I made an appointment for him to apply for his passport even before he was born,” the 28-year-old said, as her 7-month-old son napped nearby. She spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity, which her lawyers insisted on, fearing potential retaliation by the Republican administration if her identity was revealed publicly.
“I would say I definitely feel relieved that at least he’s protected,” she said.
supreme court He will hear arguments Wednesday on whether Trump’s order, which was signed on January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, is consistent with the post-Civil War era. Fourteenth Amendment The 86-year-old federal law is widely understood to make citizens citizens of everyone born in the country, with narrow exceptions for the children of foreign diplomats and invading armies. Every court that heard the case found the order illegal and blocked it from being enforced.
The call to revoke birthright citizenship is part of the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigrants that has included massive deportations, drastic reductions in the number of refugees allowed into the United States, suspending asylum at the border, and stripping temporary legal protections from people fleeing political and economic instability.
The case represents another test for the Supreme Court, which has allowed some anti-immigration efforts to continue, even after lower courts blocked them.
The first sentence of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Citizenship Clause, makes citizens “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The case revolves around the meaning of the last phrase relating to jurisdiction, which was also used in the citizenship laws passed in 1940 and 1952.
Trump’s view, reiterated in the order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” and supported by some conservative legal scholars, is that people who are here illegally or temporarily are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and therefore their U.S.-born children are not entitled to citizenship.
The Attorney General, Dr. John Sawyer argued that the Court should use this case to correct “long-standing misconceptions about the meaning of the Constitution.”
In this regard, Sawyer likened the case to the seminal 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools, and the landmark 2008 Heller case, which declared that people have a constitutional right to keep guns for self-defense.
Last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the Trump administration’s efforts to defend the order “an impossible task in light of the letter of the Constitution, history, the precedents of this Court, federal law, and the exercises of executive power.”
The two other liberal justices joined Sotomayor in dissenting from a decision by the court’s six conservative justices who used an earlier round of a birthright citizenship dispute to limit the use of nationwide injunctions by federal judges.
Expectant mothers and their advocates challenging the order, as well as lower court judges who objected to it, said the Trump administration’s arguments lacked merit.
“We have a president of the United States who is trying to radically reinterpret the definition of American citizenship,” said Cecilia Wang, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union who will take on Sawyer on Wednesday.
More than a quarter of a million children born in the United States each year will be affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and the Population Research Institute at Pennsylvania State University.
While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, birthright restrictions would also apply to people who are legally in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards, or permanent resident status.
The woman from Argentina said she came to the United States in 2016 on a visa to attend college and has since applied for a green card.
She described the moment of panic that followed the court’s ruling in June, when it was at least possible that the restrictions would go into effect, especially in states like Florida that had not defied Trump’s order. Lower court rulings over the summer ensured the matter remained pending and established the current Supreme Court case.
On top of the anticipated concerns for a first-time mother, she said, “I never thought this was so close to the end of my pregnancy that I would think about the executive order and how it would affect my baby.”
She said her son did not reconsider her decision to come to the United States or her desire to stay.
She said: “So anything that happens, politically or otherwise, will not change my view of the country, I mean because it gave me the most beautiful thing I have today, which is my family.”
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