SCOTUSblog By Neil Weare 3/26/2026
The president finds the long-settled meaning of the citizenship clause to be an intolerable obstacle to his agenda. The reason? Each year it would make U.S. citizens of tens of thousands of people who do not fit his racial and cultural ideal of what it means to be an “American.” So what does he do? His administration simply re-defines the citizenship clause to exclude those people – without seeking to amend the Constitution or even get the approval of Congress. What will the Supreme Court do about it?
But enough about the McKinley administration.
Unbeknownst to most, following the 1898 Spanish-American War President William McKinley redefined the phrase “in the United States” in the citizenship clause to deny citizenship to people born in Puerto Rico, Guam, and other territories that became subject to the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the United States following the war. Even today, the executive branch and Congress continue to label those born in most U.S. territories as “statutory” rather than “14th Amendment” citizens, claiming the power to turn their citizenship on and off at will. Indeed, those born in American Samoa remain citizens of nowhere, labeled instead “non-citizen” U.S. nationals. Through all this the Supreme Court has remained stubbornly silent.
On April 1, the Supreme Court will consider a distinct but related issue: can the Trump administration redefine the long-settled meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to exclude certain children of immigrants born under the sovereignty and jurisdiction of the United States?
In considering this question, the justices should reflect on the ongoing denial of 14th Amendment citizenship in U.S. territories over the last 125 years as a troubling lesson of what happens when it defers to the political branches on the meaning of this clause.
The citizenship clause as an obstacle to empire
After McKinley’s “splendid little war” with Spain ended, the United States was in a dilemma about what to do with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, which it had acquired as spoils of war. The nation was deeply divided between “imperialists” like McKinley and his future Vice President Theodore Roosevelt who wanted to keep and govern these islands as colonies, and “anti-imperialists” like author Mark Twain and industrialist Andrew Carnegie who thought becoming a colonial power was incompatible with the constitutional and democratic values of the United States. Both sides nevertheless agreed that under no circumstances should the people of these islands – who they viewed as racially and culturally inferior – be included within the American polity as U.S. citizens.
There was just one problem for the imperialists – the long-settled understanding of the citizenship clause was that it applied equally to people born in the United States and U.S. territories alike.
During congressional debates over the citizenship clause, the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lyman Trumbull, explained that it “refers to persons everywhere, whether in the States or in the Territories or in the District of Columbia.” Just five years after the citizenship clause was ratified, the Supreme Court concluded that it “pu[t] at rest” any notion that those “who had been born and resided always in the District of Columbia or in the Territories, though within the United States, were not citizens.” And mere months before the start of the Spanish-American War, the Supreme Court confirmed in its landmark decision United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the citizenship clause, “in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, . . . of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.” (As far back as 1828, Justice Joseph Story had also explained that “[a] citizen of one of our territories is a citizen of the United States.”)
These decisions make sense – from the founding through the ratification of the 14th Amendment large swaths of the United States were still territories and not yet states. So a rule that did not recognize people born in the territories as automatic U.S. citizens would have been the subject of significant debate. There was none.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/when-the-supreme-court-let-a-president-get-away-with-redefining-birthright-citizenship/
