The Justices will weigh Trump’s order against the established precedent.
By Catholics for Catholics
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court is scheduled to go into an old debate: what does the word “citizen” mean?
According to a story by The Washington Times, the matter this time will be for the justices to decide whether children born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrant parents or foreigners in the country on only a temporary visitor’s visa fall under the 14th Amendment’s language, or whether President Trump can change more than a century’s worth of law and practice through an executive order.
The issue is what the amendment means when it says citizenship is guaranteed to all people born in the U.S. and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
“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,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices in his final brief in the case. “Temporarily present aliens are by definition not domiciled here, while illegal aliens lack the legal capacity to form such a domicile.”
Sauer said that was the interpretation for much of the country’s history, expressed by justices before the Civil War, by some of the key lawmakers who formed the 14th Amendment, and by the executive branch in the years after the amendment’s ratification.
For Sauer, the issue is that for more than a century the scholarly consensus has weighed heavily in the opposite direction.
Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s immigrant rights project, said the Trump administration’s position simply recycles the dissenting arguments in 1898.
“There is no dispute that when people come here from a foreign country, they are subject to our laws, and their children, if born here, are U.S. citizens,” Wofsy said.
He added that the concept of birthright citizenship is universally deep-rooted.
“Americans understand this,” he said. “We live our lives based on this as our shared American culture and legal framework, and so many of the systems in this country are built around the shared understanding that if you are born in this country, you are an American citizen.”
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