Free Republic

A federal judge on Friday declined to block President Donald Trump's revised birthright citizenship order after the Supreme Court struck down his first plan. Trump originally directed federal agencies to interpret the 14th Amendment as not granting citizenship to the children of illegal aliens, but the Supreme Court shut down that order, prompting him to issue a revised directive. U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman previously issued a stay on Trump's first order, but did not do so against the revised version, Reuters reported. The Biden-appointed judge was nonetheless skeptical of the order's constitutionality. Trump signed the revised order earlier this...

Lansing—Democratic members of the Michigan Board of State Canvassers voted Monday against certifying the Americans for Citizen Voting initiative, leaving the proposed constitutional amendment to require proof of citizenship off the November ballot after a contentious debate. The four-member board deadlocked 2-2, with Republican members Chair Richard Houskamp and Paul Cordes voting to certify the petition and Democratic members Vice Chair Mary Ellen Gurewitz and Heather Cummings voting against certification. Since the Board has four members in order to have a petition certified there must be at least three members who vote for it. The initiative needed 629 valid signatures...

An extremely bad Supreme Court decision coinciding with an international soccer tournament and a blockbuster Hollywood movie show that U.S. citizenship no longer belongs to us, but to the entire world. In Trump v. Barbara, the John Roberts SCOTUS Majority declared on June 30 that any child, regardless of his parents’ citizenship, legal status or residency, is a U.S. citizen. During the 2026 FIFA World Cup U.S. soccer star Folarin Balogun was a media poster child for automatic birthright citizenship. Time magazine ran an article entitled “The U.S. Can Thank Birthright Citizenship for Its Best World Cup Player.” Frankly, having...

Yesterday, the President signed new Executive Orders expanding the definition of who is excluded from Birthright Citizenship. While there is an absolute likelihood that all those really smart attorneys and other people in the Executive branch came up with the updated policies independent of anything I floated here, in the blogosphere, and through indirect channels, I will take it as a win. Even if independently arrived at by others, the ideas floated here definitely appear to have been ground into the sausage making process of the new policies. Never underestimate the impact of Free Republic on national debates! -- Back...

President Trump issued an order Thursday to crack down on “birth tourism” after he was defeated at the Supreme Court earlier this summer on the birthright citizenship issue. Trump said the executive order would stop wealthy people from “buying their way” into citizenship with pregnant women traveling to the US birth an American baby. “They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” he said during a signing ceremony in the Oval Office. The order bars citizenship for children born to mothers who enter the United States for the sole purpose of having a child on American...

Texas Congressman Brandon Gill is a rising superstar in the Republican Party.You might have caught him dressing down the Smithsonian director with instant-classics like asking if politeness is a form of “white supremacy.”Things that are “white supremacist,” according to the left:Being polite.Being on time.Being objective.We let this insanity go unanswered for years. That ends now. pic.twitter.com/LpXtZAE2NP— Congressman Brandon Gill (@RepBrandonGill) July 23, 2026Unlike a lot of other GOP politicians, however, Gill isn’t just going to toss a few scraps of red meat our way while ignoring it’s actually his job to solve problems.Congress is not political theater and you guys...

The commercial surrogacy industry asks us to believe that contracts can redefine motherhood, assign parenthood, and eliminate the bonds formed during pregnancy and infancy. Kyla’s experience demonstrates the opposite.Two strangers arrived at Kyla Simpson’s Florida home in March 2025 to collect the three baby boys she had carried in her womb, brought into the world, and nurtured for four and a half months. They claimed they had been sent by the children’s intended father — a Chinese citizen who had commissioned the surrogacy but had never traveled to the United States. Kyla refused to answer the door and contacted authorities....

Sen. Jim Banks has offered a text-and-precedent-bound response to a decision his opponents assumed had ended the debate.When the Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara on June 30, 2026, opponents of birthplace-citizenship reform declared the fight over. But that disappointing decision was not the end of attempts to reform the system. It was merely the “end of the beginning.” Sen. Jim Banks read Barbara as a legislative map. His new Citizenship Act follows the road Wong Kim Ark charted.Barbara held that President Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional by locking in birthplace citizenship’s definition from a much older case. That 1898...

The Supreme Court dealt a setback to President Trump at the end of June when they ruled that so-called “birthright citizenship” was enshrined by the 14th Amendment and that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment. The Court, in Trump v. Barbara, rejected Trump’s executive order banning the practice 6-3, although only five justices held that the order violated the 14th Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote on narrower statutory grounds.As we’ve written, the Department of Justice immediately launched a crackdown on birth...

Rush Limbaugh: What the 14th Amendment ACTUALLY Says About Birthright Citizenship

Native Americans won U.S. citizenship in 1924, but the struggle for voting rights stretched on for much longer. Native Americans couldn’t be U.S. citizens when the country ratified its Constitution in 1788, and wouldn’t win the right to be for 136 years. When Black Americans won citizenship with the 14th Amendment in 1868, the government specifically interpreted the law so it didn’t apply to Native people.

Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-OH) shared that he would reintroduce former Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV) “exact bill” that would not only eliminate birthright citizenship for the children of illegal migrants, but also clarify who can receive birthright citizenship. In a post on X, Moreno responded to another post from Fox News’s Bill Melugin, who shared that in 1993, Reid had introduced the Immigration Stabilization Act of 1993. Moreno stated that they would “see how today’s DC Democrats will vote when offered the ideas of the Democrat party that used to love” the U.S. “I will reintroduce this exact bill when I...

Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in part with the Supreme Court ruling opposing President Trump's ending of birthright citizenship and in part dissented, leaving an open door to Congress to make the necessary adjustments to refuse citizenship to children of illegal immigrants who have no permanent status in the United States. He said that the Executive Order from Trump "establishes new exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens unlawfully or temporarily in the country." Those exceptions created by Trump were "for children born to foreign citizens who are either illegally or temporarily in the United States." Kavanaugh does...

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the principal dissenting opinion in Trump v. Barbara, where the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) ruled on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s executive order barring birthright American citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens and temporary visa holders is a violation of the 14th Amendment. In his dissenting opinion, Thomas writes that “both the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race.” “Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States,” Thomas writes: Blacks were...

“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his dissent to the Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision to insert birthright citizenship into Americans’ Constitution. He continued in plain language to show how the decision endorses birth tourism, which would automatically grant full citizenship to foreign adults who have never lived a full day in the United States: The Court’s interpretation is not only contrary to the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, it produces grotesque results. While foreigners who...

Official transcript from the US Senate on May 30, 1866. Senator Jacob Howard, who introduced the 14th Amendment: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens...” SCOTUS got this ruling 100% wrong. A total travesty.

1776, Not 1608: What the Supreme Court Got Wrong on Birthright CitizenshipChief Justice Roberts forgot the Declaration of Independence.Chief Justice John Roberts begins the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship opinion in Westminster in 1608 with Calvin’s Case and the English law of royal subjectship.I would begin in Philadelphia in 1776.Between those two places—and those two moments—lies the American Revolution. And the Revolution changed more than who governed America. It changed the very foundation of political membership.That is the central problem with the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara. The Court’s opinion is learned, careful, and historically rich. Chief Justice Roberts...

The Supreme Court will be releasing Opinions from the October 2025 this morning at 10:00.Scotusblog will be liveblogging the release and we will be following along.There are 4 decisions pending for this term and we expect all of them will be released today. You can find a list of the cases at October 2025 cases. Note: The word "held" after the case name indicates the Opinion has already been released. The word "Issues" indicates the questions to be resolved by the Court.You can find the Opinions on this term's previously decided cases at October 2025 Opinions. Today's opinions will be...

The Trump administration on Monday announced it is seeking to revoke the citizenship of 17 U.S. citizens accused of immigration fraud, expanding its unprecedented denaturalization campaign. CBS News exclusively reported about the plans before they were unveiled by the Justice Department. Officials said the move represents the largest-ever effort by the U.S. government to use its denaturalization powers, which were rarely invoked before President Trump returned to the White House last year with promises to launch a historic deportation blitz. Between 1990 and 2017, the Justice Department filed an average of just 11 legal complaints per year seeking to denaturalize...

The federal government is moving to denaturalize more than a dozen “criminal aliens” for allegedly lying about their past crimes, including child sexual abuse, fraud, and drug dealing, during the naturalization process. Officials with the Justice Department told the Washington Examiner that the denaturalization actions, announced on Monday, are “unprecedented.” The suspects include convicts originally from Somalia, Haiti, Colombia, Mexico, Cuba, and Jamaica who are accused of withholding information from immigration authorities that would have made them ineligible to receive citizenship. Federal law has long allowed the government to try to denaturalize foreign-born U.S. citizens who officials believe committed fraud...