Opinion: Trump's limit on birthright citizenship is a return to the law as intended

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30-01-2025

Less than two weeks into this second Trump presidency, the fearmongering has already reached fever pitch. 'He can't do it!' the critics have invariably howled in decrying President Trump's landmark Day 1 executive order upending the status quo on birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are neither permanent residents nor citizens. The usual suspects in the punditocracy say Trump's order is blatantly unconstitutional and that it violates settled law. Perhaps it's even 'nativist' or 'racist,' to boot!
Like the Bourbons of old, pearl-clutching American elites have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Because when it comes to birthright citizenship, the virtue-signaling and armchair excoriation is not just silly; it's dead wrong on the law. Trump's Jan. 20 executive order on birthright citizenship is legally sound and fundamentally just. He deserves credit, not condemnation, for implementing such a bold order as one of his first second-term acts.
The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, reads: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' The clause's purpose was to overturn the infamous 1857 Supreme Court case, Dred Scott, and thereby ensure that Black Americans were, and would forever be, full-fledged citizens.
The clause was understood to apply to Black Americans because, even before emancipation, they had long been universally viewed as 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States — unlike, for example, Native Americans. (Congress did not pass the Indian Citizenship Act, which finally extended birthright citizenship to Native Americans, until 1924.)
Our debate today thus depends on whether, in 1868, foreign citizens or subjects — whether here legally or illegally — were considered 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States.
They weren't.
In the post-Civil War Republican-dominated Congress, the 14th Amendment was intended to constitutionalize the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Rep. James Wilson (R-Iowa), who was then House Judiciary Committee chairman and a leading drafter of the 14th Amendment, emphasized that the amendment was 'establishing no new right, declaring no new principle.' Similarly, Sen. Jacob Howard (R-Mich.), the principal author of the Citizenship Clause, described it as 'simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already.'
The relevant part of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 reads: 'All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.' In other words, 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' necessarily excludes those 'subject to any foreign power.' As then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lyman Trumbull (R-Ill.) said during the ratification debate, 'subject to the jurisdiction' means subject to the United States' 'complete' jurisdiction — that is, 'not owing allegiance to anybody else.'
And so the 14th Amendment, properly understood, does not constitutionally require that a child born in the U.S. to noncitizens be granted citizenship. (Whether Congress passes additional rights-bestowing laws is a separate matter.)
This understanding was unchallenged for decades. In the 'slaughterhouse cases' of 1873, Justice Samuel Miller interpreted the Citizenship Clause as 'intended to exclude from its operation children of … citizens or subjects of foreign States born within the United States.' And in the 1884 case of Elk vs. Wilkins, Justice Horace Gray held that 'subject to the jurisdiction' means 'not merely subject in some respect or degree to the jurisdiction of the United States, but completely subject to their political jurisdiction, and owing them direct and immediate allegiance.'
It's true that Gray inexplicably reversed course in an oft-cited 1898 case, United States vs. Wong Kim Ark. Over a powerful and compelling dissenting opinion, Gray held that there is some level of birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of lawfully present noncitizens. But even in that wrongfully decided case, the court emphasized that its holding was limited to children of 'resident aliens' who were under 'the allegiance' of the United States. The court repeatedly emphasized that its holding applied only to children of those legitimately 'domiciled' here.
In no world whatsoever does Gray's pro-birthright citizenship opinion in Wong Kim Ark apply to children of people in the U.S. illegally. Eighty-four years later, in Plyler vs. Doe, the court dropped in a superfluous footnote indicating that Wong Kim Ark also applies to the children of people in the U.S. illegally. But this nonbinding footnote from Justice William J. Brennan Jr., a leading liberal, does not the 'law of the land' make.
Extending birthright citizenship that far is, at best, a live and unsettled legal debate. But the original meaning of the 14th Amendment is quite clear. Its authors would have been aghast at the notion that people who broke our laws could then be afforded birthright citizenship for their children. The drafters likely foresaw, as so many today do not, the tremendous perverse incentives induced by such an ill-conceived policy.
The legal eagles so eager to call out President Trump are wrong. And he, yet again, is right.
Josh Hammer is a senior editor-at-large for Newsweek. This article was produced in collaboration with Creators Syndicate. @josh_hammer
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.