This case arises from the Trump administration’s attempt to preclude certain individuals from birthright citizenship. Shortly after taking office, President Trump issued an executive order denying United States citizenship to children whose parents are not citizens or legal permanent residents. The executive order was quickly subject to several nationwide injunctions, including one issued by the district court below, on the grounds that the executive order violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. That Clause provides that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction therof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The historians’ brief—authored by Professor Martha Jones and Historians Council Member Professor Kate Masur—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 provides necessary historical context for the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship guarantee. Contrary to the Trump administration’s argument that the Fourteenth 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. 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 that was constitutionalized in the Fourteenth Amendment.
