Trump rails against ‘stupid’ birthright citizenship after leaving Supreme Court hearing on landmark case: Live updates – UK Times

On his Truth Social, after leaving oral arguments at the Supreme Court halfway through, Donald Trump falsely claimed that the United States is “the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

His one sentence post is then signed “President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

Thirty-two other countries around the world, most of them in the Western Hemisphere, have birthright citizenship laws that are substantially similar to the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Another 50 or so countries have more limited variations of birthright citizenship.

Oral arguments in a monumental Supreme Court case examining whether Donald Trump’s executive order to rewrite the 14th Amendment and redefine who gets to be a citizen have ended.

The justices, three of whom include Trump appointees, largely appeared skeptical of the scope and implications of Trump’s order and arguments in its defense.

A decision is expected by June or July.

The 14th Amendment states 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.”

Justice Kentaji Brown Jackson pointed to a hypothetical example, that she would be arrested in Japan if she stole someone’s wallet, and Japan would prosecute someone if someone stole her wallet there. She would be “still locally allowing allegiance in that sense,” she said, the same way a temporary resident in the U.S. and undocumented people have “allegiance” by virtue of “just by being in the U.S.”

“Absolutely right,” Wang said.

A newborn would then owe “natural allegiance as a U.S. born citizen,” she said.

Noah Baron, the assistant director of litigation for Asian Americans Advancing Justice, which filed an amicus brief in support of the respondents, called the government’s sources “astonishingly bad.”

“The historical evidence that the government has been relying on in oral argument today is almost entirely without merit,” Baron told The Independent.

Baron said the letter “relies upon a completely baseless historical analysis. It might not even be a letter from him.”

“They’ve relied on arguments from an overt white nationalist from the 19th century, including one person who argued in favor of segregation in Plessy,” said Baron, referring to the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” decision that legalized segregation.

“So the array of sources they have at their disposal is astonishingly bad,” he said.

Justice Samuel Alito , whose birthday is today, asked a hypothetical question about a child born to an undocumented Iranian immigrant who would be “subject to a foreign power” under the 1866 Civil Rights Act.

Cecillia Wang with the ACLU stressed that “subject to” is much different than “subject of.”

“If the only test is whether that U.S.-born child is considered a citizen of another country under their [citizenship laws], then no foreign national’s children [would be granted citizenship],” she said.

She continued to argue that the constitution’s framers were “crystal clear” about creating a “universal common-law rule of citizenship.”

The court cannot take the Trump administration’s policy goals into consideration to “re-engineer and radically re-interpret the 14th Amendment,” Wang said.

Gorsuch questions how the ACLU is squaring arguments against the opinions in Elk v Wilkins and United States v Wong Kim Ark — both written by the same justice, Horace Gray.

In 1884’s Elk, the Supreme Court ruled that a man born in the United States on an Indian reservation was not a citizen because he was not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Congress later enacted the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 that establishes citizenship for Native Americans previously excluded by the Constitution.

And in Ark in 1898, the court determined that a child born to Chinese parents became “at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States by virtue of the first clause” of the 14th Amendment.

“Trying to understand how the legal community understood what happened in Wong Kim Ark. It seems to me it’s a mess. Maybe you can persuade me otherwise,” Gorsuch asked the ACLU’s Wang.

Donald Trump may have wanted to look the Supreme Court in the eye as justices heard arguments over his attempt to limit birthright citizenship, but he clearly had no interest in hearing what the attorney opposing his executive order had to say.

The president left the Supreme Court chamber just as Solicitor General John Sauer — his former personal attorney — was finishing his presentation before the high court.

Cecillia Wang, national legal director for the ACLU, argues that Sauer’s admission that the Trump administration is not trying to overturn Wong Kim Ark is “fatal” to the government’s arguments.

“That is a fatal concession,” she said.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the third of Trump’s appointees to the Supreme Court, says the administration’s reading of the 14th Amendment introduces “a new kind of citizenship” that she suggests is unworkable.

What would the government do about “foundlings” whose parents aren’t known, she asked.

She cut off Sauer’s answer, saying “yeah yeah yeah yeah, but what about the Constitution?”

She also asked him to square the administration’s arguments with common-law understandings of “jus soli” (when one is born) and “jus sanguinis” (to whom one is born) that were very much understood by 1868 when Civil Rights Act amendments were established.

If the founders meant only a “jus sanguinis” argument to determine citizenship, why didn’t they say that, she asked.