The legal fight centers on the meaning of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.” For more than a century, that language has been understood to guarantee citizenship to nearly anyone born in the country, with narrow exceptions.
Sauer urged the Justices to revisit that consensus, arguing that the clause was intended to apply primarily to the children of formerly enslaved people—those who, he said, had established allegiance to the United States—and not to the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors. Those children, he contended, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the constitutional sense.
But the court’s questions quickly exposed skepticism with that reasoning.
Justice Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, drilled into one of the Administration’s central concepts: that citizenship should hinge on whether a child’s parents are “domiciled” in the United States. He questioned both the historical basis and the workability of that standard, noting that immigration laws were far less developed when the amendment was ratified in 1868.
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