Hello, this is Jeff Barnum reading the Supreme Court syllabus in Trump, President of the United States et al. v. Barbara et al. search rural before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Argued April 1, 2026, decided June 30, 2026. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the court in which Justices Sodomaar, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson joined. The question presented is whether the Constitution guarantees citizenship to children born in the United States of parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country. Under the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. On January 20, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14160, titled Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship. The order provides that children born in the United States of parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present here are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, and thus do not qualify for citizenship under the 14th Amendment or the Immigration and Nationality Act, or INA, which uses the same language. Several parents filed suit, some in the name of their children, arguing that the executive order violates the Fourteenth Amendment and the INA. The District Court agreed provisionally certified a nationwide class of children who would be denied citizenship by the order and preliminarily enjoined the order's enforcement. This court granted Sircherori before judgment. Held. Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause. The Citizenship Clause must be understood in light of its historical context, from the English common law to the widespread condemnation of the court's decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford, 19 Howard 393, a Supreme Court case from 1857. Under the English common law, children born within the sovereign's dominions owed a natural allegiance to the sovereign who protected them at birth, regardless of how momentary and uncertain their presence. Such children were therefore natural-born subjects, the same rule applied to children born of parents subject to expulsion. The rule's exceptions were narrow, children born in lands the sovereign did not control, children born in areas temporarily outside the sovereign's control, and children of foreign ministers by a fiction of extraterritoriality. This common law of citizenship, known as use soli or the right of the soil, crossed the Atlantic and prevailed in each and all of the states after American independence. The rule was applied even to the novel situation of quasi-sovereign Indian tribes who maintained dominions of their own, such that Indians born under those dominions were not citizens, but members of alien and sovereign tribes. In a nation of immigrants, Eus Soli's broad scope took on particular importance, assuring that children of foreigners, including those here on a temporary sojourn, would be American citizens by birth alone. In Dred Scott v. Sanford, the court departed from the common law and adopted the view that blood, not soil, determined citizenship. It held that those descended from slaves could not be citizens. The decision was met with shock, and abolitionists swore to undo what the court had done. In the midst of the Civil War, Attorney General Edward Bates issued a landmark opinion citing key authorities, including Calvin's case and Kent's commentaries, rejecting the premise that citizenship is ever hereditary, and declaring that every person born in the country is, at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen, without any reference to race or color. The exceptions were few, the small and admitted class of the natural-born composed of the children of foreign ministers and the like. Following the war, Congress sought to turn Bates's opinion into law by enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which made citizens of all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed. The Act was simply assumed to invoke the common law rule. What the Civil Rights Act began, the Fourteenth Amendment and its repudiation of Dred Scott would finish. The Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause mirrored the common law's criteria for citizenship, starting with territory, a child must be born in the United States, and ending with sovereign power, a child must be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. A child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen. Even the language of the clause is that of the common law, echoing cases and treatises that describe the common law rule, and its principal author explained that its language was simply a declaratory of the law of the land already. The Citizenship Clause's key phrase, subject to the jurisdiction, refers to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory. The scope of that power was settled largely by Schooner Exchange vs. McFadden, 7 Cranch 116, a Supreme Court case from 1812, where Chief Justice Marshall explained that jurisdiction referred to the full and complete power of a nation within its own territories, susceptible of no limitation not imposed by the nation itself. The narrow exceptions to jurisdiction arose where exercising jurisdiction would degrade the dignity of foreign sovereigns, most frequently in the case of foreign ministers. But private individuals who traveled to the United States for business or caprice were amenable to the jurisdiction of the country. Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present here are thus subject to the nation's jurisdiction. The court's precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark 169 U.S. 649, a Supreme Court case from 1898, confirms this rule. For nearly two decades after the amendment's ratification, the executive branch viewed the citizenship clause as simply an affirmance of the common law, with the limited exception of the children of foreign ministers, and others with rights of extraterritoriality. But the end of the Reconstruction era brought uncertainty. Around that time, the State Department began to deny citizenship to those with dual or doubtful allegiance, and several scholars proposed a new international law-based theory of the citizenship clause, focused on the parent's status, not the child's. Only if a child's parents were domiciled in the United States was the child internationally subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, as the citizenship clause, they said, required. Acknowledging that the common law took a different view, these writers insisted that use solely had not been made part of the Constitution. In Wong Kim Ark, the court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was declaratory of the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth that prevailed at common law, excluding only those recognized as exempt from the jurisdiction of this country, the children of ambassadors, and those born in the nations of Indian tribes. All others were citizens at birth, whether born to permanent residents or temporary visitors. The court wrote that the words subject to the jurisdiction thereof must be presumed to have been understood in the same sense as Chief Justice Marshall used them in schooner exchange. Under that understanding, aliens who traveled to the United States for business or pleasure received no exemption from the jurisdiction of the country. To the contrary, they were subject to that jurisdiction for as long as they remained here, and any children born to them were American citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment. Arguments for limiting birthright citizenship to those domiciled in the United States fail. These arguments err in their definition of allegiance, contending that natural allegiance was no longer sufficient for citizenship, and that some greater quantum of allegiance based on domicile was required. There is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view. Sources from 1776 to 1868 defined allegiance by birth, just as the British did as the tie or duty owed by one who is born within the dominions and under the protection of a particular sovereign. Domicile and national citizenship are distinct concepts. One who establishes a domicile in a new country does not automatically become a citizen thereof, nor does he automatically lose his prior citizenship. The congressional debates over the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment confirmed the common law rule. Statements embracing the common law rule were far more frequent and explicit than ambiguous references to temporary sojourners. For a Congress intent on putting the question of citizenship once and forever to rest, a domicile-based qualification would have introduced significant uncertainty. Yet the word domicile appears just twice in the discussion of the relevant provision of the Civil Rights Act, and in only one speech from the Citizenship Clause debates. Sources from after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment do not put in doubt the understanding of the Citizenship Clause at the time of and after its ratification. In any case, post-enactment history cannot override the text. If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design. Words appearing frequently in the executive order, mother, father, lawful, temporary, are absent from the clause. Attempts to narrow Wong Kim arc by noting that the court's opinion repeatedly referred to the domicile of Wong's parents fail because the holdings' underlying reasoning cannot be squared with a domicile requirement. The court exhaustively canvassed the text and history of the citizenship clause and at no point identified any evidence that the ratifiers thought themselves to be imposing a domicile limitation. Affirmed. Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the court, in which Justices Sotomayor Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson joined. Justice Jackson filed a concurring opinion in which Justice Sotomayor joined as to the introduction and part one. Justice Kavanaugh filed an opinion concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part. Justice Thomas filed a dissenting opinion in which Justice Gorsuch joined. Justice Alito and Justice Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions. Thank you for listening. Please help us by rating and reviewing this podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 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