Letters from an American - The Legacy of Birthright Citizenship

Episode Date: April 3, 2026

April 1, 2026Trump attended the Supreme Court hearing of the case under which he hopes to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, The Fourteenth Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision and established that Black men were citizens, While discriminatory laws persisted until after WWI, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of children born in the US, In the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision, the court upheld birthright citizenship, Trump appeared at the Supreme Court presumably to intimidate the justices during the hearing, The ACLU’s Cecilia Wang, herself a Fourteenth Amendment citizen, argued the case for the plaintiffs.Watch today's recording here: https://www.youtube.com/live/g9TUa1Rwd6U?si=T8_KKcHQZElhpnZ-Get full, free access to Letters from an American here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribeYou can also find me:Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/hcrichardson.bsky.socialInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/heathercoxrichardson/?hl=enFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@heathercoxrichardson Get full access to Letters from an American at heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe

April 1st, 26. Today, for the first time in U.S. history, a sitting president attended oral arguments at the United States Supreme Court. President Donald J. Trump broke precedent to take a seat in the front row of the Supreme Court's public seating area, alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnik, to observe arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara, a case under which Trump hopes to end the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. The case argued before the court today grew out of Trump's executive order of January 20th, 2025, the day he took the oath of office a second time, titled Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. Fulfilling a campaign promise, the order declared that, contrary to the 14th Amendment, individuals born in the United States are not citizens if their parents do not have legal, permanent status.

With the help of the American Civil Liberties Union, or ACLU, and other partners, three families who represented the many people endangered by this order sued the administration. Barbara, for whom the case is named, is an applicant for asylum from Honduras, whose baby was due after the order was set to go into effect. Trump has called for ending birthright citizenship since his first term as part of his appeal to his racist supporters who want to end black and brown equality in the United States. But his argument would overturn the central idea of the United States,

articulated in the Declaration of Independence, that we are all created equal. The 14th Amendment that established birthright citizens, came out of a very specific moment and addressed a specific problem. After the Civil War ended in 1865, former Confederates in the American South denied their black neighbors basic rights. To remedy the problem, the Republican Congress passed a civil rights bill in 1866, establishing that 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,

and such citizens of every race and color shall have the same rights in every state and territory in the United States. But President Andrew Johnson, who was a Southern Democrat elected in 1864 on a union ticket with President Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, vetoed the 1866 civil rights bill. While the Republican Party organized in the 1850s to fight the idea that there should be different classes of Americans based on race, Democrats tended to support racial discrimination. In that era, not only black Americans, but also Irish, Chinese, Mexican, and indigenous Americans faced discriminatory state laws. In contrast to the Democrats, Republicans stated explicitly in their 1860s, platform that they were opposed to any change in our naturalization laws or any state legislation by which the rights of citizens hitherto accorded to immigrants from foreign lands shall be abridged or impaired and in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of

citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad. When Republicans tried to enshrine civil rights into federal law in 1866, Johnson objected that the proposed law comprehends the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called gypsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, as citizens, and noted that if all persons who are native-born already are, by virtue of the Constitution, citizens of the United States, the passage of the pending bill cannot be necessary to make them such. And if they weren't already citizens, he wrote, Congress should not pass a law to make our entire colored population

and all other accepted classes citizens of the United States when 11 southern states were not represented in Congress. When Congress wrote the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, it took Johnson's admonition to heart. It did not confer citizenship on the groups Johnson outlined. It simply acknowledged that the Constitution had already established their citizenship. The first sentence of the 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. In the short term, Americans recognize that the 14th Amendment overturned the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that people of African descent are not included and were not intended to be included under the words citizens in the Constitution and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. The 14th Amendment established that black men were citizens. But the question of whether the amendment recognized birthright citizenship for all immigrants quickly became an issue in the American West, where white settlers were not terribly concerned

about black Americans. There were only about 4,200, 272 black Americans in California in 1970, while there were almost half a million white Americans, but wanted no part of of allowing Chinese men to be part of American society. Western state legislatures continued to discriminate against Asian immigrants by falling back on the country's early naturalization laws, finalized in 1802, to exclude first Chinese immigrants and then others from citizenship. Those laws were carefully designated to clarify

that Afro-Caribians and Africans imported to be in, would not have the same rights as Euro-Americans. Those laws permitted only free white persons to become citizens. In the late 19th century, state and territorial legal systems kept people of color at the margins using treaties, military actions, and territorial and state laws that limited land ownership, suffrage and intermarriage. As late as 1922, in the case of Takeo O'Zawa v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that Takao O'Zawa, born in Japan, could not become a citizen under the 1906 Naturalization Act because that law had not overridden the 1790 naturalization law limiting citizenship to free white persons. The court decided.

decided that a white person meant persons of the Caucasian race. A Japanese born in Japan, being clearly not a Caucasian, cannot be made a citizen of the United States, it said. The next year, the Supreme Court decision in United States v. Bagot Singh Thinned upheld the argument that only free white persons could become citizens. In that case, the court said that Thinned, an Indian Sikh man who identified himself as Indo-European could not become a U.S. citizen because he was not a white person under U.S. law, and only free white persons could become citizens. After the thin decision, the United States stripped the citizenship of about 50 South Asian Americans who had already become American citizens. Those discriminatory laws would stand until after

World War II, when U.S. calculations of who could be a citizen shifted along with global alliances, and Americans of all backgrounds turned out to save democracy. But despite the longstanding use of laws designed to perpetuate human enslavement to prevent certain immigrants from becoming citizens, the Supreme Court always upheld the citizenship of their children. In 1882, during a period of racist hysteria, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, agreeing that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. Wong Kim Ark was born around 1873,

the child of Chinese parents who were merchants in San Francisco. In 1889, he traveled with his parents when they repatriated to China, where he married. He then returned to the U.S. leaving his wife, and was readmitted. After another trip to China in 1894, though, customs officials denied him re-entry to the U.S. in 1895, claiming he was a Chinese subject because his parents were Chinese. Wong sued, and his lawsuit was the first to climb all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, thanks to the government's recognition that with the U.S. in the middle of an immigration boom,

the question of birthright citizenship must be addressed. In the 1898, U.S. v. Wong Kim Arc decision, the court held by a vote of six to two that Wong was a citizen because he was born in the United States. Immigration scholar Hidei Takah Herota of the University of California, Berkeley, explains that the government went even further

to protect children born in the U.S. In 1889, the Treasury Department, which then oversaw immigration, decided that a native-born child could not be sent out of the country with her foreign-born mother. Nor did the government want to hurt the U.S. citizen by expelling her mother and leaving her without a guardian. So it admitted the foreign-born mother to take care of the citizen child. The Treasury concluded that it was not the intention of Congress to sever the sacred ties existing between parent and child, or forcibly banish and expatriate a native-born child for the reason that its parent is a pauper.

In May 2023, then presidential candidate Donald J. Trump released a video promising that on day one of a new presidential term, he would issue an executive order that, end birthright citizenship. He claimed that the understanding that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen is based on an historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates. But one judge after another has cited against him on this issue, and he apparently showed up at the Supreme Court today to try to intimidate the three judges who owe their seats on the bench to him into supporting his own radical reworking

of one of the key principles of our nation. He left after an hour and a half before Cecilia Wang, the ACLU lawyer arguing for the plaintiffs, began to speak. Later, Wang described what it was like to argue in court today. She explained,

it's a nerve-wracking experience to argue any case in the Supreme Court and especially one as weighty as this one, where the President of the United States is taking aim at a cherished American tradition, an individual right of citizenship, based on your birth in this country. I myself am a 14th Amendment citizen

because my parents had not yet naturalized when I was born. So I walked in today with the spirit of my parents and so many people's ancestors in that first generation of Americans, Whether they naturalized or not, I consider them all Americans. They came to this country with hopes and dreams, and they gave birth to future Americans. And that's us.

Letters from an American was written and read by Heather Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, Dead in Massachusetts, recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.