Northwestern experts on SCOTUS hearing birthright citizenship case

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Northwestern experts on SCOTUS hearing birthright citizenship case

Court will consider the constitutionality of Trump's desire to end the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment Wednesday

EVANSTON, Ill. --- The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Trump v. Barbara, a case that could determine whether individuals born in the United States are U.S. citizens.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court after Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 declaring that individuals born in the U.S. are not citizens at birth if their parents lack sufficient legal status. The Court's ruling will determine the constitutionality of the executive order.

The following Northwestern professors are available to media

Kate Masur, the John D. MacArthur Professor of History at Northwestern, is a member of the Brennan Center for Justice Historians Council on the Constitution and the author of "Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction."

In an amicus brief in Trump v. Barbara, Masur and co-author Martha S. Jones detail the 80 years of advocacy for birthright citizenship undertaken by free Black Americans - including those who had never been enslaved - that shaped the 14th Amendment.

Quote from Professor Masur

"By the 1850s, free Black Americans stood firmly behind a fully formed view of citizenship as derived from birthright. They insisted that all free persons born in the United States were citizens of the United States and rejected any scheme that gave politicians the authority to abridge that principle."

And, as the brief explains, "[A]s representatives of a nation in which 13.2 percent of the population were immigrants, the Framers well understood that the Amendment's broad terms would recognize and protect the citizenship status of the children of immigrants."

Daisy Hernandez, associate professor of English and director of the English major in writing, is an essayist, memoirist and journalist. Her work focuses on the intersections of race, ethnicity, immigration, class and sexuality. She is the author of "Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth."

Quote from Professor Hernandez

"The Dominican Republic serves as a harbinger of what could happen in the United States if the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration in Trump v. Barbara. In 2010, the Caribbean country began denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, and then the country's Constitutional Court made the law retroactive to 1929, stripping birthright citizenship from several generations of children whose parents didn't have citizenship, the vast majority of them Haitian. Overnight thousands became stateless.

"An author, I come from a mixed-status immigrant family so I can speak to having birthright citizenship while other family members were under deportation orders or had refugee status."

If you'd like to arrange an interview with Professors Masur and/or Hernandez, please reach out to Stephanie Kulke at [email protected].

Paul Gowder, Frederic P. Vose Professor of Law, is a renowned scholar on the 14th Amendment. His research focuses on the rule of law, democratic theory, social and racial equality, institutional and organizational governance, law and technology, and classical Athenian law and political thought.

Quote from Professor Gowder

"Despite what the Trump administration and certain opportunistic careerists in the legal academy want you to think, there is no serious debate about the meaning of the 14th Amendment's birthright citizenship clause - it covers everyone born in the 50 states of the United States with a tiny handful of hyper-narrow exceptions where a person's parents are present under the color of competing claims of sovereignty over the same territory (military invaders, members of Native American nations) or as formal representatives of foreign sovereigns (diplomats).

"There are no other exceptions. This has been the unbroken interpretation of the 14th Amendment since it was ratified. The whole point of the Amendment was to create a firm baseline of citizenship for everyone born in the territory, so that the country would never again be tainted by the second-class quasi-citizenship that free Black Americans had been subjected to on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Donald Trump's unconstitutional executive order would instead make citizenship a matter of uncertainty and luck for countless Americans and betray the most fundamental principles of Reconstruction. I expect the Supreme Court to recognize these basic propositions and unambiguously strike it down."

Dan Rodriguez, Harold Washington Professor of Law, has expertise in the areas of administrative law, local government law, statutory interpretation, federal and state constitutional law and the law-business-technology interface.

If you'd like to arrange an interview with Professors Gowder and/or Rodriguez, please reach out to Shanice Harris at [email protected].