Hello, this is RJ Deakin, reading the Supreme Court of United States opinion syllabus in Trump, President of the United States, versus Barbara Sertiari before judgment to the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, argued April 1, 2026, and just decided June 30th, 2026. 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, 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, which uses the same language. That's 90 Federal Register 8449. Several parents filed suit, in some in the name of their children, arguing that the executive order violates the 14th 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 enjoying the order's enforcement. This court granted sortiari before judgment. The Supreme Court held the decision below is affirmed, and Chief Justice Roberts delivered the opinion of the court. 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 versus Sandford. Under the English common law, children born within the sovereign's dominions owed a natural allegiance to the sovereign who protected them at birth. That's one blackstone. Regardless of how momentary and uncertain their presence, that's Calvin's case, which is an English case, it looks like. Such children were therefore natural born subjects, citing Doe versus Jones, which is again an English case. The same rule applied to children born of parents subject to expulsion, see for example, for Blackstone 166. The rule's exceptions were narrow. Children born in lands the sovereign did not control, children born in areas temporarily outside of the sovereign's control, and children of foreign ministers by a fiction of extraterritoriality. That's Calvin's case again. This common law of citizenship, known as just soli, or right of the soil, crossed the Atlantic and prevailed in each and all of the states after American independence. That's two J. Kent commentaries on American law. The rule was applied even to the novel situation of quasi-sovereign Indian tribes who maintained dominion 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, Jus 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. See two life and writings of Frederick Douglass. 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 colors. That's opinion of the Attorney General, or 10 opinion of the Attorney General, 382 at 394 and 399. The exceptions were few, the small and admitted class of 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. That's Section 114 Statute 27. The Act was simply assumed to invoke the common law rule. See Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, first session, uh 1116, Representative Wilson speaking, and at 1832, Representative Lawrence. 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 common law, echoing cases and treatises that describe the common law rule. See, for example, uh Lynch, Kent. And uh and its principal author explained that its language was simply declaratory of the law of the land already. That's Congressional Globe, 39th, Congress, first session, 2890, Senator Howard. The citizenship clause's key phrase subject to the jurisdiction refers to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory. That's uh N Webster and an American Dictionary of the English Language at 7372 definition of jurisdiction. Um J. Worcester, Dictionary of the English Language 1435, definition of subject. The scope of that power was settled largely by Schooner Exchange versus McFadden, uh 7 Crant 116, 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 the 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 versus Wong Kim Ark 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. That's memoranda of Secretary of State H. Fish to Mr. Marsh, May 19th, 1871, in Two Digest of the International Law of the United States, Section 183, page 394. 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 parents' status, not the child's. That's uh F. Wharton Conflict of Laws, Section 10, page 35. 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 Jus Soli had not been made part of the Constitution. In Wong Kim Arc, the court held that the Fourteenth Amendment was a declaratory or was declaratory of the fundamental rule of citizenship by birth that prevailed at common law. It's 169 U.S. at six eighty eight, 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 the permanent residence 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. Wong Kim Ark under those 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. Those 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. That's English trustees of Sailor Snugs Harbor in city of New York at 3 Pet 99. 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 confirm the common law rule. Statements embracing the common law rule were far more frequent and explicit than ambiguous references to temporary sojourners. See, for example, Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, first session at 1117. For Congress's intent on putting the question of citizenship once and forever to rest. That's Congressional Globe 42nd Congress, first session, 575. 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. See Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, first session, uh 1160 at uh and uh 1117. And in only one speech from the Citizenship Clause debates, uh sources from after the ratification of the 14th 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 Wang's parents fail because the holdings underlying reasoning cannot be squared with a domicile requirement. The court exhaustively canvassed the text in History of the Citizenship Clause, and at no point identified any evidence that the ratifiers thought themselves to be imposing a domicile limitation. The decision below is 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 in part one. Justice Kavanaugh filed an opinion concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part. Justice Thomas filed a dissenting opinion, in which Justices Gorsuch and Alito joined. Oh, sorry, in which Justice Gorsuch joined. Justice Alito and Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions. Thanks for listening. We do have some ice presence up here in Montana. If uh anybody would like to do any uh paralegal um paralegal type prep of uh immigration work up for Loki esque law in uh Montana, feel free to reach out and uh maybe we can find some work for you. Thanks. Oh, that's Rhodes Scholar80 at gmail.com, as I've said for years. R O A D S like the Truck Driving Rhodes, Scholar like the Scholar, and the number 80 at gmail.com.