For the Supreme Court, Thursday’s hearing was the start of a speedy review of the White House’s effort to overturn the guarantee of birthright citizenship.
But for President Trump, the court’s arguments were just the latest chapter in a story that goes back more than a decade.
Mr. Trump has for years used questions about citizenship and who gets to claim to be an American to power his rise from reality TV star to commander in chief.
In 2011, Mr. Trump began to question President Barack Obama’s birthplace in television interviews, pushing a racist lie that he was really born in Kenya and therefore ineligible for the White House.
“Why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?” Mr. Trump asked on ABC’s “The View” in 2011. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” Mr. Trump said on NBC’s “Today Show.”
The more Mr. Trump questioned Mr. Obama’s presidency, the better he did in early presidential polling in 2012. And Mr. Trump has continued to question what constitutes being an American to stoke anger and enthusiasm when faced with a political challenge. He has often argued that birthright citizenship only encourages immigrants to cross into the United States en masse, exhaust the resources of local communities and make the lives of Americans harder.
He leaves out that many economists say immigration helps the American economy.
“Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the “SUCKERS” that we are,” Mr. Trump said on social media on Thursday.
In 2016, Mr. Trump asserted that one of his Republican rivals in the election, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, was ineligible because he was born in Canada to an American mother.
And last year, Mr. Trump reposted a report from a website prone to circulate conspiracy theories that falsely claimed that because the Indian immigrant parents of one of his Republican rivals, Nikki Haley, were not yet citizens when she was born in South Carolina, she was disqualified from running for the presidency.
“It is true that a large part of his technique has been a kind of otherizing, suggesting we are not one people,” said Laurence H. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard University. “Whenever he can find a way to put someone on the wrong side of the line of us and them, he will do it.”
The issue before the court on Thursday was primarily about whether federal judges have the power to order block presidential actions through wide-ranging temporary pauses, known as nationwide injunctions. A ruling in Mr. Trump’s favor could set the stage for him to implement his order ending automatic citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and certain foreign residents.
Mr. Trump took aim at birthright citizenship in his first term, when he called the constitutional right “frankly ridiculous.” He wasted no time trying to strike it down when he returned to the White House in January, signing an executive order to rescind it the day of his inauguration and calling the action “a priceless and profound gift.”
“The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” according to the executive order.
Legal experts disagree with that assertion. Many have said Mr. Trump’s order would fly in the face of a guarantee enshrined in the Constitution for more than 150 years — and one seen as settled law since a case reaffirmed that right in 1898. During the oral arguments on Thursday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that the order violated four Supreme Court precedents.
But that has not stopped Mr. Trump from pushing his executive action over the issue of citizenship. Or his political attacks over who should be allowed to claim it.
Zolan Kanno-Youngs is a White House correspondent for The Times, covering President Trump and his administration.
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