What this Update Mean for AAPI Voters
At the highly anticipated oral arguments on April 1, 2026, the Supreme Court heard a major constitutional challenge to the Trump administration’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment and federal law. The government’s case to end birthright citizenship was argued by United States Solicitor General D. John Sauer. Cecillia Wang, the National Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) argued in support of preserving the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship.
The government’s position is that children born in the U.S. to temporary-status immigrants, which would include the undocumented, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore are not entitled to automatic citizenship. Attorney Wang argued that to end would upend a foundational constitutional guarantee and potentially deny citizenship to hundreds of thousands of children each year, creating a large class of people born in the U.S. without legal status. The justices probed each side on the archaic meaning of terms such as, “sojourner”, “domicile” and “allegiance”.
There was a particularly interesting issue raised by Justice Jackson on the question of allegiance. She pointed to an amicus brief which illustrated that during WWII when the federal government confined Japanese Americans in camps throughout the US the issue of “allegiance” never came up for children born in those camps. These children were afforded birthright citizenship even in cases where the parents were foreign nationals, classified as enemy aliens or had renounced the US citizenship. If allegiance of the parents were truly a constitutional requirement for birthright citizenship, one would imagine it would be invoked during a time of war.
Commentators have noted that many of the justices seemed skeptical of the government’s arguments to end birthright citizenship. The outcome of this case will likely not be issued until the end of June or early July at which time we will learn whether that skepticism was enough to preserve birthright citizenship.
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