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For Monica, one of the immigrant mothers at the heart of the legal battle over birthright citizenship, the supreme court’s decision on Tuesday upholding the constitutional right passed through her like a cool, deep breath.
The court affirmed that her son is, unequivocally, a US citizen. “I feel relief,” she said over the phone Tuesday morning. “He has a future.”
But there are still no guarantees for her and her husband, both asylum seekers from Venezuela. “In this country, we remain uncertain – especially given everything immigrants are facing now,” she says.
Parents, legal scholars and immigrant rights advocates around the country are feeling these same mixed emotions.
There is relief that the supreme court halted Donald Trump’s effort to unilaterally end the longstanding American principle that almost everyone born on US soil is a citizen. In a 6-3 ruling, the court averted a crisis wherein more than 250,000 children each year would have been born in the US without citizenship, and many would be stateless.
It upheld – just barely – an American ideal that anyone born in this country is equally deserving of its citizenship and the privileges thereof, a culture of assimilation and a multiracial society.
Then, there is anger that the decision was not unanimous – that it was so close. Six justices agreed to strike down Trump’s executive order – issued immediately after he took office last year – to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas. But only five justices concurred it was unconstitutional. Brett Kavanaugh, in a concurring opinion, wrote that the order ran counter to federal law but did not, in his opinion, violate the 14th amendment of the constitution – which guarantees equal civil and legal rights and grants citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States”, including formerly enslaved people after the US civil war.
There is worry that the three conservative justices who dissented have given weight and legitimacy to fringe theories in legal scholarship that challenge the longstanding understanding of American citizenship.
“Today is a day not to celebrate the Court affirming what we all already knew to be true, but to reflect on the damage this case has done to our democracy and what we are going to do to fight back,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, of the immigrant advocacy and legal aid group ImmDef.
There is also the dismay that the birthright citizenship decision is just one setback in the president’s crusade against immigration and immigrants. Trump, who rose to national prominence by baselessly questioning Barack Obama’s birthright, has spent his second term pushing to radically redefine who is allowed to live in the US, who can claim safety here and ultimately who deserves to be American.
Since Trump look office in January last year, his administration has so far enacted more than 700 immigration restrictions. Last week, the supreme court affirmed Trump’s decision to unilaterally strip legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 4,000 Syrians who have fled political instability, cleared way for the government to turn away asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border by physically blocking them from setting foot on US soil, and granted border officials broad discretion to deport lawful permanent residents or green card holders.
As a result of these and other policies, net migration to the US is in a historic decline. Trump’s immigration policies and militarized enforcement raids have left scars in cities and towns across the US, separating tens of thousands of families.
“We are watching this country move, decision by decision, toward becoming an authoritarian, white supremacist autocracy,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project. “Today’s decision lets us hold on to increasingly slippery hope that we are not there yet.”
Monica, whose baby was born 10 months ago in a country litigating his nationality and future, said she is grateful she can hang on.
It was a triumph, she said, that she and her husband – two asylum seekers – can one day tell their son how they helped fight for his rights in the supreme court. She wants to start writing out the story of how she joined the challenge to Trump’s executive order in 2025, speaking to lawyers and the media even as she was managing morning sickness, and how she tried her best to remain calm through everything so she wouldn’t risk her pregnancy – even when it seemed impossible to do so.
“I want to put it all down in a book, to make a compilation of all the interviews and news of everything that happened before he was born, so that he can know how we fought for him and all the children like him,” she said. “We fought for the truth.”
Read more coverage of today’s supreme court rulings:
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