The ugly history behind Trump’s birthright citizenship case in the Supreme Court

Key Points:

• Three days into President Trump's second term, Judge John Coughenour blocked Trump's executive order aiming to strip citizenship from children born in the U.S. to undocumented or temporarily present immigrants, citing the clarity of the constitutional issue.
• The Supreme Court is currently reviewing the case Trump v. Barbara, where Trump's legal arguments against birthright citizenship rely on weak, historically discredited claims rooted in 19th-century white supremacist efforts to deny citizenship to Chinese Americans.
• Trump's legal brief heavily references Alexander Porter Morse, a 19th-century lawyer who unsuccessfully argued that the 14th Amendment should exclude children of "transient" foreigners from citizenship, a theory that was abandoned even by Morse himself due to its impracticality.
• The 14th Amendment clearly grants citizenship to all persons born in the U.S. except for children of foreign diplomats and certain Native Americans, a standard reaffirmed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which settled this constitutional question over a century ago.
• Legal scholars note that Trump's attempt revives a long-rejected and unworkable argument that contradicts established constitutional language and precedent, making it unlikely that the Supreme Court will uphold the administration's anti-citizenship order.