NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Wong Kim Ark
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown is co-leading a legal filing to help defend birthright citizenship—established in the landmark 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark—against the Trump administration at the U.S. Supreme Court.
President Donald Trump has been working to end birthright citizenship since his first day in office last year, when he signed an executive order to end the constitutionally protected right. Trump’s executive order violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil. Ending birthright citizenship would jeopardize the status of millions of American children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. It could also eventually jeopardize the citizenship status of Americans born to immigrant parents decades ago.
“On the day he took the oath of office to protect the Constitution, President Trump immediately undermined it with this blatantly illegal executive order,” Brown said in a statement. “No single person can redefine American citizenship, not even the president.”
Following Trump’s executive order last year, groups of states filed two lawsuits challenging the order, both of which were successful. The Supreme Court will now consider the order’s validity in the case of Barbara v. Trump, a challenge brought by children who themselves would lose citizenship under the order.
Brown, 23 other attorneys general, more than 20 states, and one city filed an amicus brief to explain why Trump’s executive order violates the Fourteenth Amendment, and how it would harm states and residents.
People stripped of their citizenship will lose basic rights, Brown said in his statement, and be forced to live under the threat of deportation. This includes infants, who “will be stateless, lacking a home country to return to.”
“They will lose eligibility for a wide range of federal services and programs. They will lose their ability to obtain a Social Security number and, as they age, to work lawfully. And they will lose their right to vote, serve on juries, and run for certain offices,” Brown said. “Despite the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship, thousands of children will—for the first time—lose their ability to fully and fairly be a part of American society as a citizen with all its benefits and privileges.”
States will lose federal funding for programs they administer, including Medicaid—which the Trump administration and Republican-led legislature already gutted, in the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill—the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and foster care and adoption assistance programs. All of these programs rely in part on the citizenship status of the person they serve.
States will also immediately have to modify operations and administration of benefits, time, and expense that come out of these states’ own agencies and pockets.
Brown also highlighted that “although the order President Trump signed indicates it would only apply to babies born after a certain date, there is no reason to believe the Trump administration will stop there if a court sides with its theories.”
“The citizenship of countless Americans could be called into question,” he said, “including those accorded birthright citizenship decades ago.”
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