Undoubtedly
This week, The Supreme Court has agreed to decide whether children born on American soil are American citizens.
Here’s what that looks like.
The fluorescent light hums. A woman lies in the bed, her gown thin, her hair damp. She crossed a border three years ago. Now there is a baby. The baby is breathing. The baby is on American soil. In the next room, another baby. Another mother. This one a citizen.
The form is in the nurse’s hand.
For 157 years, this part of the Constitution has been boring. The Fourteenth Amendment says “all persons born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” The nurse fills out the form. The baby is a citizen. No one asks for papers. No one makes a phone call.
Now that routine is on trial. And the question underneath is the question that has always been underneath: Who gets to draw the circle of belonging?
This question was asked before. On the Senate floor. In 1866. Senator Edgar Cowan of Pennsylvania pointed to California, where Chinese immigrants were having children. He asked the men writing the Fourteenth Amendment directly: Is the child of the Chinese immigrant in California a citizen?
The answer was one word.
Undoubtedly.
Not “it depends.” Not “we’ll have to see.” Not “that’s a complicated question.”
Undoubtedly.
That word traveled onto every birth certificate for the next 157 years.
You still hear the dodge, that this was only about freed slaves, not immigrants. But the men on that Senate floor were not confused. They were picturing Chinese laborers. Families who would never be white. Still having children on American soil. Cowan pressed further. He worried about Gypsies. Roma. Europe had never wanted them. The framers heard him. They passed the amendment anyway.
Blood on the Senate Floor
Look at who wrote it.
Charles Sumner. Massachusetts senator. In 1856, he gave a speech against slavery. Two days later, a congressman from South Carolina walked onto the Senate floor with a metal-topped cane. He found Sumner at his desk. He beat him until the cane broke. The blood was on the carpet and on the desk and in his eyes. It took three years to recover. Three years of pain so severe he wished he had died on that floor. He came back. He was not the same man. He kept fighting.
Thaddeus Stevens. Pennsylvania congressman. Born poor. Born with a club foot. In 1837, Pennsylvania wrote a new constitution that stripped Black men of the right to vote. They asked Stevens to sign. He would not sign. He walked out. When he died, they buried him in a Black cemetery. The only one that would accept all races. He had asked for this.
These were the men who wrote “all persons.” These were their scars.
They had just lived through Dred Scott. Nine men in robes had ruled that no Black person—free or enslaved—could ever be an American citizen, because Black people “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Nine men decided who was a person and who was not.
The Radical Republicans understood something about verification systems. They become exclusion systems. If you let officials decide who qualifies, officials decide against people they don’t want. They had watched it happen. They had bled for watching it. So they wrote “all persons.” Not because they couldn’t imagine exceptions. Because they had seen what happens when you create them.
The form in the nurse’s hand was written by men who bled so she would never have to ask.
The Five Words
The administration’s argument is five words: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The Fourteenth Amendment has two tests. Born on U.S. soil. Subject to the jurisdiction. The baby in that hospital passes the first test. No one disputes that.
The fight is over the second.
The administration says undocumented immigrants are not truly under U.S. jurisdiction. They are present, but they owe allegiance to another country. Their children do not qualify.
But in 1866, there was no legal category called “illegal alien.” There were two buckets. People the law could not reach—diplomats, invading armies. And everyone else.
The test was simple. Can the law touch you?
Diplomats have immunity. You cannot arrest them. Not under jurisdiction. Invading armies are enemy combatants. Not under jurisdiction.
Everyone else? Watch what the government does, not what it says.
It arrests them. It detains them. It tries them in court. It deports them.
You cannot deport someone you have no authority over. Deportation is jurisdiction. The government cannot say “we have the power to remove you” and then say “but we have no jurisdiction over your child.” That is the same sentence contradicting itself.
If the law can reach the mother, the child born here is a citizen. That is the second test. That baby passes it, just like it passed the first.
The Supreme Court already ruled on this. In 1898, Wong Kim Ark stood in a San Francisco courtroom. Born there. American soil. His parents were Chinese. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, they could never become citizens. The government argued their son’s allegiance followed his blood.
The Court said no. Six justices held: a child born here, to parents the law can reach, is a citizen.
That ruling is the bridge between that baby in San Francisco and the baby under the fluorescent light now. It has stood for 127 years.
So when people say this is not settled, they do not mean the history is unclear. They mean they have found a Court willing to ignore it.
Broad Enough
On January 20, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14,160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It directs federal agencies to deny citizenship documents to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders.
Every federal court to review it has struck it down. Now the Supreme Court will decide.
One year after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, Frederick Douglass gave a speech about who belongs in America.
Douglass was born into slavery. He escaped. He was hunted. He had every right to want this country burned. He chose otherwise.
He knew the arguments against opening the doors—the fears about Chinese immigration, the warnings about being “swamped.”He was listening to the same arguments you see in social media comment sections now.
He answered: “I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity.”
Then he said this: “If we would reach a degree of civilization higher and grander than any yet attained, we should welcome to our ample continent all nations, kindreds, tongues and peoples, and as fast as they learn our language and comprehend the duties of citizenship, we should incorporate them into the American body politic. The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come.”
A man born property. Who escaped to become a person. Who lived to see citizenship written into the Constitution for everyone born on this soil. He believed the wings were broad enough.
The men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment already had this debate. A senator asked about the children of immigrants. The answer was undoubtedly. They said it because they had seen Dred Scott. Because they had been beaten on the Senate floor. Because they knew what happens when nine men in robes decide who counts as a person.
They wrote “all persons” so that a nurse filling out a birth certificate would not need a law degree. Would not need to look at the mother’s face and decide. Baby born here. American. Full stop.
The form is still in the nurse’s hand. This Court will decide what she’s allowed to write—whether two babies born in the same hospital on the same day are the same or different.
The men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment saw where that path leads. They bled to close that door.
This Court is reaching for the handle.
NOTES & SOURCES
Supreme Court & Executive Order
Supreme Court agrees to hear birthright citizenship case SCOTUSblog (December 5, 2025) https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/12/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-trumps-challenge-to-birthright-citizenship/
Executive Order 14,160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” January 20, 2025; federal courts struck it down NPR (December 5, 2025) https://www.npr.org/2025/12/05/nx-s1-5619186/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-arguments-in-birthright-citizenship-case
1866 Senate Debates
Cowan-Trumbull exchange: “Is the child of the Chinese immigrant a citizen?” / “Undoubtedly”; Cowan’s concerns about Gypsies Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st Session (1866), via American Immigration Council https://americanimmigrationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Birthright%20Citizenship%20091509.pdf
Senator Jacob Howard: “foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors” Constitutional Accountability Center https://www.theusconstitution.org/blog/truths-and-untruths-about-the-constitutional-origins-of-birthright-citizenship/
Trumbull’s definition of jurisdiction: “not owing allegiance to anybody else” Claremont Review of Books (Congressional Globe citations) https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/digital/birthright-citizenship-a-response-to-my-critics/
Caning of Charles Sumner
Preston Brooks, metal-topped cane, May 22, 1856; blinded by blood; three-year recovery U.S. Senate Historical Office https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/The_Caning_of_Senator_Charles_Sumner.htm
Thaddeus Stevens
Club foot; refused to sign 1837 Pennsylvania constitution over Black voting rights; buried in Shreiner’s Cemetery (integrated); tombstone epitaph Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/thaddeus-stevens-papers/articles-and-essays/timeline/
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
“No rights which the white man was bound to respect”; 7-2 decision; considered worst Supreme Court decision National Archives https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/dred-scott-v-sandford
United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898)
Born San Francisco; parents Chinese subjects barred from citizenship; 6-2 ruling affirming birthright citizenship Constitution Center https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/supreme-court-case-library/united-states-v-wong-kim-ark-1898
Frederick Douglass, “Composite Nation” (1869)
“I know of no rights of race superior to the rights of humanity”; “The outspread wings of the American eagle are broad enough to shelter all who are likely to come” Teaching American History https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/our-composite-nationality/
But that was before the White Privileged imagined that the increasing number of immigrants would “replace” them.
A black President woke them to the possibility — and turned their fear of losing “privilege” into violence and rage.
Thus was Trump created and exalted to rescue the White Privileged from the horrible fate of equality, the very essence of democracy.
Which is why democracy must go. Because when faced with the reality of “all men created equal,” the White Privileged would prefer their prior superiority.
Cue the outrage.
But really, who’s going to stop them?
Congress? The Supremes? The Army? Voters?
Please.
Thanks for another clear exposition of this issue! The Supreme Court shouldn't have to think very hard before throwing Trump's executive order out the window. But with *this* court? I'm worried.