❓WHAT HAPPENED: President Donald J. Trump weighed in on the Supreme Court hearing regarding his Executive Order ending birthright citizenship after attending the oral arguments in a historic first for a sitting President.
👤WHO WAS INVOLVED: President Trump, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) counsel Cecillia Wang, and Supreme Court Justices.
📍WHEN & WHERE: Wednesday, during oral arguments at the Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.
💬KEY QUOTE: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” – Donald J. Trump
🎯IMPACT: During the course of the arguments, all nine justices expressed degrees of skepticism regarding the Trump administration’s position, namely that birthright citizenship is limited to those “domiciled” in the United States.
President Donald J. Trump weighed in on the Supreme Court hearing regarding his Executive Order ending birthright citizenship after attending the oral arguments in a historic first for a sitting President. “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social after leaving the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The case, one of the most complicated to be taken up by the high court in decades, stems from President Trump’s challenge to a lower court ruling that struck down his Executive Order. For just over two hours, the nine justices peppered the Trump administration’s Solicitor General D. John Sauer and the challengers’ attorney, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) counsel Cecillia Wang, with questions regarding the scope of the order and the legal implications of domicile-based citizenship.
During the arguments, all nine justices expressed varying degrees of skepticism regarding the Trump administration’s position, namely that birthright citizenship is limited to those “domiciled” in the United States. In this legal context, only the children of individuals intending to maintain a permanent and legal presence in the United States could attain citizenship at birth. Notably, this would exclude almost all illegal immigrants.
George Washington University law professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley, writing on X (formerly Twitter), remarked that the Supreme Court overall appears skeptical of the government’s arguments, but stopped short of suggesting the case will be a defeat for President Trump. “The ACLU clearly had a lock on the three liberals, but had more justices in play than the government would have hoped. We ended where we began: the odds do not favor the Administration, but there is no firm evidence of a majority,” Trurley wrote, adding, “Majorities can certainly shift in conference and in drafting. The devil is in the details and the details remain murky at best. Many justices correctly found the historical record, according to one, ‘a mess.’ Indeed, it is maddening to try to divine the intent of the drafters.”
For most of the arguments, the justices focused heavily on a series of past civil rights laws and court decisions that have formed the nebulous—and admittedly murky—legal justification for birthright citizenship as it stands today. Notably, the United States stands almost entirely alone among developed Western nations in its permissive approach to birthright citizenship.
Not a single European state allows unrestricted birthright citizenship, with most requiring either that one parent be a citizen or a legal permanent resident and, in some cases, mandating that at least one parent reside in the country for a set period. As of 2004—when Ireland abolished its expansive jus soli (“right of the soil”) laws—Europe ceased offering unrestricted birthright citizenship entirely. Canada is the only other Western nation with similar statutes granting unrestricted birthright citizenship. Meanwhile, Australia and New Zealand abolished their permissive birthright citizenship laws in 1986 and in 2006, respectively.
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