SCOTUSblog By César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández 11/19/2025
Immigration Matters is a recurring series by César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández that analyzes the court’s immigration docket, highlighting emerging legal questions about new policy and enforcement practices.
Please note that the views of outside contributors do not reflect the official opinions of SCOTUSblog or its staff.
In its defense of President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting access to birthright citizenship, the Justice Department claims that the government’s policy would bring the United States in line with the modern global trend. It is true that most countries do not grant citizenship at birth to people born within their borders with as few restrictions as the United States. But that isn’t new: The United States has been a global outlier since the 14th Amendment was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868.
Understanding which countries grant citizenship primarily based on the location of birth, and which don’t, helps make sense of the 127-year-old approach that the Justice Department is asking the court to reconsider. This also reveals the troubling history of why certain countries have chosen not to recognize birthright citizenship in the first place.
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Trump’s birthright citizenship order, which denies U.S. citizenship to some children born in the United States based on the citizenship or immigration status of their parents, has faced legal challenges since shortly after the president signed it in January. In June, the court weighed in on the administration’s side regarding a technical – albeit important – procedural issue, and over the past five months courts considering a new round of lawsuits have uniformly concluded that the executive order is likely illegal. In its petition asking the court to review decisions from two federal courts – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit and the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire – the Justice Department argues that broad access to citizenship at birth “degrades” and “dilutes” U.S. citizenship. “Presumably for those reasons, hardly any developed country retains a theory of citizenship similar to the United States’ current approach,” the U.S Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, writes in the government’s petition.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/11/birthright-citizenship-and-american-exceptionalism/
