Trump Weighs In on Supreme Court Case Involving Birthright Citizenship

The president has argued that birthright citizenship was meant to grant citizenship to the children of enslaved people after the Civil War.

The Supreme Court building in Washington on Jan. 26, 2022. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

President Donald Trump on Thursday morning weighed in on the U.S. Supreme Court hearing arguments in a case involving his order to limit birthright citizenship, arguing that the current law is being exploited.

Earlier this year, Trump issued an executive order to limit birthright citizenship, which was halted by several federal judges. The case is now in the hands of the Supreme Court after the administration submitted an emergency appeal to the highest court.

“Big case today in the United States Supreme Court. Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.

He said the United States “is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows—But the drug cartels love it!”

Going further, Trump said that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868 and three years after the end of the Civil War, was designed to provide citizenship to children born to enslaved people.

“Remember, it all started right after the Civil War ended, it had nothing to do with current day Immigration Policy!” Trump wrote.

The first sentence of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment 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.”

It and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, were ratified about a decade after the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision. That decision upheld slavery in U.S. territories and states while denying that black people could be considered citizens.

On his first day in office, Trump issued an order that made reference to the Dred Scott case, with the White House stipulating in a statement that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ’subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'” the White House said.

Birthright citizenship is among several issues, many related to immigration, that the administration has asked the court to address on an emergency basis, after lower courts’ rulings hampered the president’s agenda.

In Thursday’s arguments, the nine justices will be weighing whether judges have the authority to issue what are called nationwide, or universal, injunctions. The Trump administration, like the Biden administration before it, has said that judges are overreaching by issuing orders that apply to everyone instead of just the parties before the court.

The administration is asking for the court orders to be reined in, not overturned entirely, and spends little time defending its executive order on birthright citizenship. The Justice Department points out that there has been an “explosion” in the number of nationwide injunctions issued since Trump retook the White House. The far-reaching court orders violate the law as well as long-standing views on a judge’s authority, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote on behalf of the administration in its petition.

One of the judges who ruled against the administration, Judge Danielle Forrest of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, wrote in February that the government has not been able to argue that the current circumstances “demonstrate an obvious emergency” to issue the order.

A separate ruling issued by the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also blocked Trump’s order.

“The Government expressly declines to make any developed argument that it is likely to succeed on appeal in showing that the Executive Order is either constitutional or compliant with” federal law, the court said in a unanimous decision.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.