WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara, a case in which the Court considered the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order purporting to limit birthright citizenship to children who have at least one parent who is a citizen or is lawfully admitted for permanent residence, Constitutional Accountability Center (CAC) Senior Appellate Counsel Smita Ghosh issued the following reaction:

The Supreme Court’s decision this morning blocked the Trump administration’s effort to withhold birthright citizenship from children of undocumented or temporarily present parents. A majority of the Court rejected the administration’s argument that the Constitution, which grants citizenship to those “born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” exempts those whose parents lack “domicile” in or “allegiance” to the United States. As the Court explained, the framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment embraced a rule in which everyone born in the United States and generally subject to American authority would acquire citizenship by birth, no matter the status of their parents. And they intended, in the words of then-Senator Trumbull, to put the question of citizenship “once and forever to rest.”

It is deeply disappointing that four justices on the Court accepted, to various degrees, the Trump administration’s domicile theory, calling into question the principle of citizenship regardless of parentage that Trumbull and his colleagues wrote into the Constitution. As explained in an amicus brief CAC filed in the case on behalf of an ideologically diverse group of legal scholars, the government’s domicile argument is at odds with the Constitution’s text and history. As the Court’s majority noted, the best evidence the government could muster was a historian’s “funeral oration” for President Lincoln—and, as our brief explained, that historian actually believed that anyone “who first saw the light on the American soil was a natural born citizen.”

By revisiting time-honored Constitutional principles with shoddy historical evidence, these justices would have left text-and-history reasoning—as well as American citizenship—in jeopardy.