President Donald Trump ranted against the U.S. and its centuries-long tradition of birthright citizenship, saying the U.S. is a “STUPID Country” of “SUCKERS,” as the Supreme Court prepared to take up the issue Thursday.
In January, Trump signed an executive order declaring that children of immigrants are not entitled to U.S. citizenship despite the 14th Amendment to the Constitution’s guarantee that “all persons born” in the U.S. are citizens.
Three federal judges had stopped the order from taking effect, and on Thursday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case.
“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!” Trump wrote that morning in a Truth Social post.
“The drug cartels love it! We are, for the sake of being politically correct, a STUPID Country,” he added.
The issue hasn’t got anything to do with political correctness, though, and everything to do with the Constitution. The 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause states: “All persons born… in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Adopted in July 1868, the amendment overturned the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling that held that even free African Americans were not U.S. citizens.
Thirty years later, in 1898, the court held in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark that children of immigrants were entitled to citizenship based on the 14th Amendment even if their parents didn’t qualify.
Nevertheless, Trump offered what he called “conclusive proof” that “Birthright Citizenship is about the babies of slaves.”
“The Civil War ended in 1865, the Bill went to Congress less than a year later, in 1866, and was passed shortly after that,” he wrote. “It had nothing to do with Illegal Immigration for people wanting to SCAM our Country, from all parts of the World, which they have done for many years.”
“It had to do with Civil War results, and the babies of slaves who our politicians felt, correctly, needed protection,” he continued. “Please explain this to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
But according to Boston College professor and historian Heather Cox Richardson, while the 14th Amendment did in fact overturn the Dred Scott decision, it wasn’t intended to grant citizenship only to Black Americans.
In the 1860s, the U.S. was also home to tens of thousands of American Indians, Chinese immigrants and people of other races.
The civil rights bill that Congress originally passed in 1866 said, “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians, not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States; and such citizens of every race and color… shall have the same right[s] in every State and Territory in the United States,” Cox Richardson wrote on her Substack Letters from an American in late April.
President Andrew Johnson vetoed the bill, saying that if the Constitution already made all “native-born” people citizens, Congress didn’t need to pass a bill saying so. And if they weren’t already citizens under the Constitution, Congress shouldn’t make them citizens, Johnson argued.
According to Cox Richardson, Congress took those words to heart when drafting the 14th Amendment. Instead of conferring citizens on specific groups, it explicitly acknowledged that the Constitution had already established citizenship for “all people” born in the U.S. and under its jurisdiction (which at the time excluded Indigenous Americans).
Just a few decades later, the Supreme Court had to decide whether the 14th Amendment also applied to children of immigrants.
In 1882, the U.S. passed the Chinese Exclusion Act declaring that Chinese immigrants could not become citizens. But Wong Kim Ark, a cook who was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, sued to have his citizenship recognized.
The court’s majority found that under the English common law system—which the U.S. system is based on—children born to alien parents were natural-born subjects “within the allegiance, the obedience, the faith or loyalty, the protection, the power, and the jurisdiction of the English sovereign.” The only exceptions were diplomats serving foreign states and members of invading armies.
The same rule was in force in the English colonies prior to the Declaration of Independence and “continued to prevail under the Constitution,” the court wrote.
The Chinese Exclusion Act therefore did not apply to Wong Kim Ark, the court decided in 1898—at a time that few people would describe as “politically correct.”
Trump, however, seems to suggest the U.S. at the time was literally Black and white.
“Again, remember, the Civil War ended in 1865, and the Bill goes to Congress in 1866—We didn’t have people pouring into our Country from all over South America, and the rest of the World,” he wrote on Truth Social. “It wasn’t even a subject. What we had were the BABIES OF SLAVES.”
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