Trump intends to challenge established citizenship norms in the US Supreme Court - Bloomberg
Kyiv • UNN
Donald Trump seeks to overturn automatic citizenship for children of foreigners through the courts. The initiative could strip 250,000 people of their passports each year.
The US Supreme Court is considering a case that could significantly change the rules for acquiring birthright citizenship. Donald Trump's initiative questions the established interpretation of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and could affect hundreds of thousands of people every year. This is reported by Bloomberg, writes UNN.
Details
As the publication notes, in 2018, Donald Trump proposed abolishing automatic birthright citizenship by presidential decree, an idea so incredible that then-House Speaker Paul Ryan stated that the president "obviously cannot do that." Ryan, a Republican who later left office, referred to the text of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted after the Civil War and long interpreted as guaranteeing citizenship to virtually everyone born on US soil.
However, positions have changed. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will begin hearing the case amid Trump's assertion that the 14th Amendment was originally intended only for children of freed slaves. Some Republican lawmakers now support Trump. Moreover, a small group of conservative scholars has joined this position, advancing new arguments that the norm was originally interpreted much more narrowly than is currently accepted.
These arguments directly concern the fate of Trump's decree, which could annually strip citizenship from about 250,000 children of individuals residing in the US without legal status and temporary visitors. Democrats argue that Trump's plan could also strip citizenship from millions of current Americans, depriving them of voting rights and passports. The decree was issued by Trump last year on the first day of his second presidential term.
The case will be heard by the conservative-controlled Supreme Court and will be a test of the "originalism" approach — a judicial philosophy that has already yielded a number of important decisions on guns and abortions. This approach focuses on the words of the Constitution and their meaning at the time of adoption, relying on historical facts.
If Trump's position loses, it will be because of originalism. This will happen if two or three Republican-appointed justices believe that Trump is wrong about the meaning and history of the 14th Amendment.
Critics argue that Trump seeks to rewrite the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. The first sentence of the amendment promises citizenship to "all persons" born in the US and "subject to its jurisdiction" — a provision that many scholars, lawyers, and public servants call simple in its meaning.
The broad position on citizenship has many supporters, both in the past and present. In 1898, the Supreme Court in US v. Wong Kim Ark ruled that the citizenship clause applied to a man born in California to two Chinese parents. The Court considered the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States" and concluded that it excluded only a few narrow categories of people: children of foreign ambassadors, Native Americans, and individuals who were in the US without legal residency permission.
Federal courts have repeatedly rejected Trump's initiative. For example, Republican Judge John Coughenour in Seattle in 2025 called the decree "plainly unconstitutional" and noted that it was difficult to imagine that a lawyer could reasonably argue otherwise.
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