This week, the Supreme Court kept a promise this country made in 1868. In Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, six justices reaffirmed what the Fourteenth Amendment has held for more than a century and a half: a child born in the United States is a citizen of the United States. Striking down President Trump’s executive order by a vote of 6 to 3, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that children born here to parents “unlawfully or temporarily present” are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are “citizens at birth.” He called citizenship “the right to have rights,” and said the framers of the amendment extended their promise to every free-born person in the land. We keep that promise today, he wrote.
We cheered. Then we read the rest of the opinion.
Because the same decision that saved birthright citizenship also mapped the road around it. One justice would have upheld it only as a matter of statute, not the Constitution. Another, Justice Thomas, filed a ninety-one-page dissent arguing that the amendment protects only those “domiciled” here — a reading that would narrow the meaning of citizenship for all of us. And within hours, the President told the country none of it mattered: Congress, he said, could simply legislate birthright citizenship out of existence. “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary.”
He is right that it can be done that way. We know, because it was done that way — to our families.
We come to this fight from two different corners of American history, and we arrive at the same conclusion: birthright citizenship has never been self-enforcing, and it will not defend itself now.
Related: Expert: Why The Birthright Citizenship Ruling Still Impacts Black Americans
One of us is the proud great-great-great-granddaughter of undocumented Chinese immigrants. As a sixth-generation Chinese and fifth-generation Japanese American, Josina’s family has lived more than 170 years of Asian American history — the Chinese Exclusion Act, the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, and more than a century of fights over who gets counted as a citizen at all.
The other is a Black kid from the South Side of Chicago, raised by two women — his mother, a public school teacher, and his grandmother, a janitor — who traced their family back seven generations, to ancestors who were among the first people to taste freedom during Reconstruction. Dorian’s lineage is bound up in the very reason the Fourteenth Amendment exists. It was written, in the wake of Dred Scott and the Civil War, precisely so that people like his forebears — Black Americans born on this soil — could never again be told they did not belong.
That is the point we want to make together. Birthright citizenship was not handed to Black Americans and later borrowed by immigrants. It is one promise — forged in the fire of Reconstruction to secure Black citizenship, and extended in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, to protect the American-born children of the very Chinese immigrants the nation had tried to exclude. Black, Asian, and immigrant Americans do not hold separate stakes in the Fourteenth Amendment. We hold one.
Which is why, in Justice Thomas’s dissent, we heard something beyond a legal argument. We heard permission — permission to do to today’s families what was done to Josina’s more than a hundred years ago: to deny birthright citizenship not under the Constitution, but around it. Not by amendment, but by argument and by statute. The ruling did not close the question so much as keep it alive, inviting the next challenge forward. And what begins as a fight over immigrants rarely ends there. It reaches Asian Americans, and Black Americans, and anyone some official decides does not fit the fabric of the country.
We know this because it has already happened.
Josina’s great-grandmother, Mary Wing, was born in the United States. So were her parents. She was born a U.S. citizen. But when she married Fung Gum Wing, a Chinese immigrant, the collision of race and gender in federal law took her birthright citizenship away. Under the Chinese Exclusion Act, her husband was an “alien ineligible for citizenship.” Under the Expatriation Act of 1907, a woman was made to assume her husband’s nationality — or, in Mary’s case, his lack of one.
Mary did not lose her citizenship under the Constitution. She lost it by act of Congress. And that is exactly where the next fight will be fought. In Congress.
For twenty years, Mary was stateless — without constitutional rights or protections in the only country she had ever known. Her parents were citizens. Her children were citizens. She was not. In the 1930s, under amendments to the Cable Act of 1922, she was finally able to apply for citizenship. She applied as any immigrant would. She took the citizenship test. In 1939, her naturalization certificate arrived. Under “former nationality,” it reads: “American.”
An American, made to prove she was one.
The danger the dissent flirts with is not abstract. Strip the Fourteenth Amendment of its plain meaning, and Black Americans could once again be asked to carry papers to prove their freedom — Social Security cards, birth certificates, documentation of belonging — in a country that already over-polices and over-surveils them. The same logic that unmade Mary Wing’s citizenship is the logic that would have unmade the citizenship of Dorian’s ancestors, had the Court gone the other way. It is the same fight. It always has been.
So we think of Mary now. We think of Wong Kim Ark, who stood up for birthright citizenship in 1898 and won at the very Court that had tried to exclude him. We think of Cecillia Wang — herself a second-generation American, the daughter of immigrant students — who argued this case before the Supreme Court and won. And we think of the ancestors, Black and Asian alike, who were the reason the Fourteenth Amendment had to be written, and then defended, again and again.
This is not the beginning of the fight for birthright citizenship. Reconstruction was. Wong Kim Ark was. Mary Wing was. And the June ruling, welcome as it is, will not be the end. The threat has simply moved — from the courthouse to the Capitol, from the Constitution’s text to the statute books.
So we will keep fighting. In the spirit of Wong Kim Ark, of Cecillia Wang, of Mary Wing, and of the freedpeople who first made the Fourteenth Amendment a promise worth keeping, we will defend birthright citizenship for all. We hope Congress will too. And we hope this country finally learns what the promise always meant: that it was never to be rationed — not by race, not by gender, not by anyone’s judgment of who belongs.
Josina Morita is the first Asian American woman to serve on the Cook County board. Dorian Warren is co-president of Community Change.
