This case arises from President Trump’s attempt to preclude certain individuals from birthright citizenship. Shortly after taking office, he issued an executive order denying U.S. citizenship to children whose parents are not citizens or legal permanent residents. A federal district court issued a class-wide injunction of the executive order because, among other reasons, the order violates the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. That clause provides that “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.”
The historians’ brief — authored by Professor Martha S. Jones of Johns Hopkins University and Brennan Center Historians Council member Professor Kate Masur of Northwestern University — centers on the pre–Civil War advocacy of free Black Americans for a broad and inclusive principle of birthright citizenship to serve as a bulwark against threats of degradation, violence, and relocation. The brief argues that the framers of the 14th Amendment adopted this universalistic concept of birthright citizenship knowing that it would apply to all children born in the United States, including the children of Black Americans and immigrants.
The brief provides necessary historical context for the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee. Contrary to the Trump administration’s argument that the amendment was narrowly intended to secure citizenship for Black Americans emancipated during the Civil War, the brief argues that the amendment was also meant to respond to the arguments pressed by free Black Americans for decades before the war. Free Black Americans understood the perils of living without citizenship and sought a broad and inclusive constitutional rule that would insulate questions of citizenship from future political bargaining. It was this vision — one championed by the Lincoln administration and members of Congress fully aware that it would reach the children of immigrants as well — that was constitutionalized in the 14th Amendment.
