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The Trump administration filed a response Thursday in a legal challenge to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to limit birthright citizenship, a case the Supreme Court is expected to hear next month.
The dispute centers on Trump’s directive instructing federal agencies to interpret the 14th Amendment as excluding automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to people who are in the country illegally or temporarily, such as tourists.
The administration issued the order last year, saying it was intended to discourage pregnant visitors from traveling to the United States to give birth and to prevent illegal migrants from using the birth of a child as a path to remain in the country.
In its legal filing, the administration argued that the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause was originally intended to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children who owed allegiance to the United States.
“The ‘main object’ of the Citizenship Clause was to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, whose allegiance to the United States had generally been established through generations of parental domicile,” the brief reads. “By contrast, aliens who are just passing through the United States, and those who cross our borders illegally, lack ties of allegiance and do not obtain the ‘priceless and profound gift’ of citizenship for their children. To receive citizenship under the Clause, a person must be both born ‘in the United States’ and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof…’ That language grants citizenship to children ‘completely subject’ to the United States’ ‘political jurisdiction.’
“Children of temporarily present or illegal aliens do not qualify because their parents are not domiciled in, and thus do not owe the requisite allegiance to the United States,” the brief reads. “Temporarily present aliens are by definition not domiciled here, while illegal aliens lack the legal capacity to form such a domicile.”
Supporters of the policy say the 14th Amendment was never intended to provide automatic citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Critics argue that longstanding legal precedent recognizes birthright citizenship for nearly all people born in the United States.
The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case on April 1. The outcome could have significant implications for U.S. immigration law and the interpretation of the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause.