Birthright Citizenship is Personal For Me
In a barrage of attacks on immigration on his first day back in office, Donald Trump issued an executive order purporting to revoke birthright citizenship, the 14th Amendment guarantee that every baby born in the United States is a citizen.
The backlash to Trump’s executive order was swift. The ACLU, immigrants’ rights advocates, and 22 states immediately sued the Trump administration on the grounds that the order violates the Constitution. Within days, a federal judge temporarily blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
This right is personal for me. I was born in Los Angeles to parents who were Iranian citizens. I returned with my parents to Iran soon after my birth, where I lived until the Iranian revolution. We immigrated to the U.S. when I was nine years old. Even as a young child, I knew I was a U.S. citizen, for which I have always been grateful.
This right is also central to our Constitution and our history as a country. Not only is it unconstitutional to deny citizenship to children born in the U.S, doing so would create a permanent underclass of people who don’t have the full rights granted to every American, including the right to vote, hold a passport, and serve on juries.
We’ve faced this threat before. Throughout our history, our states and country have withheld citizenship from people of color to reinforce a rigid racial hierarchy. In contrast, birthright citizenship embodies the principle that American citizenship is not defined by race. It is fundamental to our democracy, equality, and fairness.
My interest in birthright citizenship is personal and has only deepened as I have been reading about its history since 2018, when ACLU NorCal recognized the 150th anniversary of the 14th Amendment.
The principle of birthright citizenship has its origins in centuries of English law, as well as the practice in American colonies and the early republic. It was readily extended to babies of immigrants from Europe and denied to Black children, whether born into slavery or freedom. The 14th Amendment is rooted in the struggle to abolish slavery and, specifically, as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s racist Dred Scott decision in 1857. That decision proclaimed that enslaved people were property without rights and declared that Black Americans — enslaved or free — could never be citizens.
During the post-war Reconstruction period, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which included a birthright citizenship clause, over President Andrew Johnson’s veto. That year Congress also passed the 14th Amendment, in part to prevent a future president or any state from restricting who is a citizen. By enshrining birthright citizenship in the Constitution, lawmakers ensured that even a future Congress couldn’t repeal it simply by passing a law.
Ratified by the states in 1868, the 14th Amendment holds that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside.” Crucially, it doesn’t matter who the child’s parents are or where they are from.
The amendment was tested three decades later in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court ruled that children born in the United States to noncitizen parents are U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment. The court analyzed the history of birthright citizenship, examined the parameters of “under the jurisdiction thereof” and affirmed that San Francisco-born Wong Kim Ark, who had been denied reentry to the country under the xenophobic Chinese Exclusion Act, was a citizen of the United States.
In another decision fourteen years before Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court excluded John Elk from citizenship on the basis that he was born in the jurisdiction of his tribe. It took decades for Congress to respond. In 1924, Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act, which established that all Native people born in the U.S. who were not already citizens would be citizens going forward.
Birthright citizenship — both as a constitutional principle and as a policy — provides for equal participation in American society, regardless of race or ancestry. It protects the child as a citizen, without demands for documentation of their parents’ status. Ending that guarantee, for children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or seeking asylum, is not within the power of a single president.
The ACLU is committed to defeating this executive order in court, but it is up to all of us to speak up for this bedrock principle of equal citizenship.
