The Trump administration is turning to Civil War-era white supremacists in its challenge to a more than one century-old ruling, based on the 14th Amendment, that states that most children born in the United States are U.S. citizens.
Over a century ago, Confederate officer and Louisiana attorney Alexander Porter Morse “was among a trio of thinkers who spearheaded a failed effort — steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism — to erase birthright citizenship,” The Washington Post reported. “The Trump administration is reviving their arguments to make its case today, some legal scholars say.”
University of New Hampshire history professor Lucy Salyer told the Post “she was struck that the Trump administration had chosen to elevate those figures and their ideas.”
“If you know the history and the broader context of what they were trying to achieve,” Salyer said, “it does ring alarm bells.”
The Post adds that “Trump administration attorneys cite Morse in their Supreme Court brief to argue the disputed idea that commentators in the 19th century widely agreed that the Constitution ‘exclude[s] the children of foreigners transiently within the United States’ from qualifying for citizenship.”
President Trump is making clear exactly where he stands on the issue of birthright citizenship. On his first day back in office Trump signed an executive order attempting to limit birthright citizenship for certain U.S.-born children of undocumented or temporary-status parents.
On Monday, the president went even further.
“Birthright Citizenship is not about rich people from China, and the rest of the World, who want their children, and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!”
“Look at the dates of this long ago legislation – THE EXACT END OF THE CIVIL WAR!” he continued. “The World is getting rich selling citizenships to our Country, while at the same time laughing at how STUPID our U.S. Court System has become (TARIFFS!). ‘Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!'”
The Post notes that the ACLU calls the administration’s argument “nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations.” They say it would apply to tens of thousands of children born in the U.S. every month, and would be “devastating” to families around the country.
“But worse yet, the government’s baseless arguments — if accepted — would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”
According to the Post, the 1800s campaign against birthright citizenship also relied on prominent legal scholar Francis Wharton, who posited the idea that citizenship be granted to children of European immigrants but not to children of Chinese immigrants.
“Like Wharton, the Trump administration says in its brief a child’s citizenship is dependent on the parents’ nationality, not birth in the United States.”
The Trump administration, also like Wharton, “highlights the 14th Amendment phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof ,’ saying it disqualifies children of illegal migrants and temporary visitors from becoming citizens because they can’t demonstrate the necessary political allegiance to the United States the phrase evokes.”
The case, which will consider the legality of Trump’s executive order, will be argued before the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
