Free Republic

There is now a modern twist to be considered in the birthright citizenship debate.Last week, our friends at The Federalist ran a couple of pieces — one by Brianna Lyman and the other by John Daniel Davidson — on the opportunity currently before the U.S. Supreme Court with respect to birthright citizenship and the legal absurdities our current practice encompasses.If you’re familiar at all with the history of this highly unusual practice, you know that it emanates from the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which reads…All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the...

Birthright citizenship — the idea that anyone born in the United States is automatically a citizen, with full right to receive all benefits and vote when they come of age — has been a fixture of the administration of the laws in this country for my entire lifetime. But does the text of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution make the birthright citizenship rule apply to all cases, even the most extreme? Under the 14th Amendment, properly interpreted, do children born of illegal aliens subject to a deportation order really qualify for birthright citizenship? How about children born of an...

On Friday, the Supreme Court announced that it would hear challenges to President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment automatically makes all babies born on American territory citizens. Trump’s effort to overturn the traditional reading of the constitutional text and history should not succeed. Ratified in 1868, the 14th Amendment provided a constitutional definition of citizenship for the first time. It declares that "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." In antebellum America, states...

For the first time, the Supreme Court will directly confront the legality of Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship. The politics around the case are loud and predictable. But the constitutional question at the center of it is much quieter, and far more consequential: Can any president, Republican or Democrat, unilaterally reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment? After reviewing the Court’s recent decisions and the skepticism justices have already shown toward this executive order, it’s clear that the conservative majority may not be willing to hand the White House a power this sweeping. In fact, the justices most hostile to broad...

The Supreme Court on Friday said it will hear arguments in a case that will determine if President Donald Trump can undo automatic citizenship for people born in the United States. Trump, on his first day back in the White House on Jan. 20, issued an executive order that said babies born in the U.S. more than 30 days after that order were not entitled to be issued citizenship documents if their parents were temporary visitors or illegal aliens.

The battle over who qualifies as an American at birth has officially reached the highest court in the land. On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the historic challenge to President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order restricting birthright citizenship, setting the stage for what could be the most consequential interpretation of the 14th Amendment in more than a century. Trump’s order—one of the signature actions of his America First immigration agenda—asserts that children born to illegal aliens on U.S. soil do not automatically receive citizenship, countering decades of bureaucratic interpretation and closing what critics call one of...

What did Jesus really know about the Book of Enoch and the Nephilim giants? Does the Bible hint at “extraterrestrials” cohabiting with mankind in a forgotten golden age? Glenn Beck sits down with ‪@TimothyAlberino‬ for a mind-blowing conversation that connects the dots from Genesis 6 to the coming post-human apocalypse. As futurists like Yuval Harari openly declare the end of humanity, gene editing, artificial wombs, IVF, and transhumanism are rapidly remaking man in a new image. Alberino issues a chilling wake-up call to Christians: “There’s only one qualification for redemption at the cross of Christ — you must be human.”...

The Trump administration has filed a pair of petitions to the Supreme Court asking the justices to hear appeals on its birthright citizenship order, cases which could add to the growing list of questions related to President Donald Trump‘s actions that the high court will consider in its upcoming term.The two petitions appeared on the Supreme Court’s public docket Monday, after being filed late Friday, and they urged the justices to take appeals in both cases, which were brought by Democrat-led states and a group of people who could be affected by Trump’s order.The question presented to the high court...

(Sep. 6, 2025) — In a striking opinion issued last month, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s opinion that now 75-year-old Roberto Moncada, though born in the United States, should not have been considered a “birthright” citizen. The decision was first flagged to this writer by CDR. Charles F. Kerchner, Jr. (Ret), who on August 30 posted to his blog a video from attorney and broadcaster Robert Goveia providing an analysis of the panel’s 25-page opinion. Born in New York City in 1950 to a Nicaraguan diplomat, Moncada worked in the United...

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled that a man born in New York City in 1950 is NOT an American citizen. The court affirmed what the Constitution’s framers and generations of Americans have always understood: the Fourteenth Amendment does not grant automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday said President Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order is unconstitutional. In a 2-1 ruling, the appeals court upheld a nationwide injunction against Trump’s order. The three-judge panel included: Majority: Judge Gould (Clinton), Judge Hawkins (Clinton) – Dissent: Judge Bumatay (Trump). “The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” the majority wrote.

In epic news for the MAGA movement and its mass deportation agenda, Senator Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) has pushed forward legislation that, if passes, will finally put an end to birthright citizenship, codifying into federal law what President Trump has tried to accomplish via executive order. As background, the 14th Amendment’s provision that made all former slaves citizens of the United States after the US Civil War has since been used to enshrine the concept of “birthright citizenship,” meaning that anyone who is born here is a citizen even if neither parent is an American citizen, or even here legally. Because...

A federal judge agreed Thursday to issue a new nationwide block against President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. The ruling from US District Judge Joseph Laplante is significant because the Supreme Court last month curbed the power of lower court judges to issue nationwide injunctions, while keeping intact the ability of plaintiffs to seek a widespread block of the order through class action lawsuits, which is what happened Thursday in New Hampshire. Ruling from the bench, Laplante granted a request from immigration rights attorneys to certify a nationwide class that “will be comprised only of those...

Despite a recent ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court that restricts the ability of lower court judges to block President Donald Trump’s policies using nationwide injunctions, a federal judge ruled on Thursday to bar the administration from enforcing an executive order placing limits on birthright citizenship. U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante from Concord, New Hampshire, reached his decision after advocates for immigrant rights asked him for class action status in a lawsuit they filed to represent any babies who would have their citizenship status jeopardized by the president’s order. He ruled the plaintiffs could move forward as a class, which...

There are two subjects on which I am extremely well versed: Barack Obama’s phony Connecticut Social Security number and anchor babies. I was schooled in both while working as a licensed private investigator, which I have done for more than thirty years. One of my long-time clients is a company in Taiwan. For four years, I collected, with written permission, the medical records of more than eighty Chinese women who arrived in California to give birth. Most of these women hired companies in China for $30,000, which arranged for help in getting tourist visas, arranging for living accommodations, and a...

The court tied the hands of judges at a time when Congress has been cowed and internal executive branch constraints have been steamrolled.The Supreme Court ruling barring judges from swiftly blocking government actions, even when they may be illegal, is yet another way that checks on executive authority have eroded as President Trump pushes to amass more power.The decision on Friday, by a vote of 6 to 3, will allow Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship to take effect in some parts of the country — even though every court that has looked at the directive has...

‘When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.’On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court declared rogue lower courts’ universal injunctions against President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order to be unlawful.“[F]ederal courts do not exercise general oversight of the Executive Branch; they resolve cases and controversies consistent with the authority Congress has given them. When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too,” Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote.The final decision was 6-3,...

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday handed a major win to the Trump administration by allowing it to take steps to implement its proposal to end automatic birthright citizenship. In a 6-3 vote, the court granted a request by the Trump administration to narrow the scope of nationwide injunctions imposed by judges so that they apply only to states, groups and individuals that sued. That means the birthright citizenship proposal can likely move forward at least in part in the states that challenged it as well as those that did not. The court was divided on ideological lines, with...

On the very day Donald Trump became president again, he signed an executive order prospectively eliminating birthright citizenship for children born to aliens unlawfully present in the United States. Immediately, lawsuits were filed in a half-dozen jurisdictions across the country challenging this order. The groups bringing these suits claim the order disrupts long-standing legal norms governing citizenship. Yet, in fact, Trump’s contention — that birthright citizenship is not possessed by children of illegal aliens under the “correct interpretation of the law” — is exactly right. Birthright citizenship is conventionally understood to apply to any child born in the United States,...

Attending oral argument last week in the case touching on birthright citizenship pending before the Supreme Court, I observed a combination of confusion, omissions, and outright lies from some of the justices. As the lawyer for one of the amici, I witnessed the Court address the propriety of the nationwide, universal injunctions that have been issued by several district court judges blocking the execution of President Trump’s day-one executive order on birthright citizenship. Let’s begin with the lies. Early in the argument, Justice Sotomayor unequivocally stated that the Court had held 127 years ago that anyone born on U.S. soil...