Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court”

On May 22, 2-3 PM eastern time, the Cato Institute will host an online event on “Trump v. Barbara: Birthright Citizenship at the Supreme Court.” The event is free and open to the public. Registration information available here. The participants will be prominent immigration law scholar Prof. Gabriel Chin (UC Irvine), leading legal historian Paul Finkelman (Univ. of Toledo), and myself. Dan Greenberg of the Cato Institute will moderate.

The Supreme Court held oral argument in the case on April 1, and I put up a post about some of the issues raised here. In a recent article in Lawfare, I explained why all the Trump Administration’s rationales for denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants would, if applied consistently, also have had the effect of denying it to large numbers of freed slaves and their children, thereby undermining the central objective of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This alone dooms Trump’s position under the original meaning of the Clause, even aside from all the other flaws in his arguments.