Free Republic

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...

The Trump administration has canceled several New York judicial citizenship ceremonies over unmet legal requirements and will no longer let county courts or state supreme court justices preside over them.U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is "dedicated to ensuring that all aspects of the naturalization process comply with federal law," agency spokesperson Matthew Tragesser told TV station WSYR on Wednesday.“After reviewing the jurisdiction of certain New York County courts under the Immigration and Nationality Act, we have determined that these courts do not meet the statutory requirements to conduct naturalization ceremonies," he said. \As a result, the agency will USCIS move...

Texas voters overwhelmingly approved an amendment on Tuesday that adds noncitizens to the list of individuals prohibited from voting in state elections, reinforcing that only US citizens are eligible to cast ballots. Proposition 16 passed with over 71 percent support as of Wednesday afternoon. The measure amends the Texas Constitution to explicitly include “persons who are not citizens of the United States” among those barred from voting. The list already includes convicted felons who have not met certain conditions for reinstatement and individuals deemed mentally incompetent by a court. By placing the citizenship requirement directly into the state constitution, the...

Election integrity was a key element in President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign. In March of 2025, shortly after resuming office, President Trump signed an executive order (EO) intended to increase election security and assure election integrity in American elections. A key component of that EO was the requirement for voters to provide proof of citizenship, establishing that they are eligible to cast their vote in federal elections, before being allowed to cast a ballot. That doesn't seem an unreasonable requirement, unless you're a Democrat. A U.S. District judge has now overturned that provision of the president's order. Donald Trump’s request...

A federal judge ruled Friday that President Donald Trump’s request to add a documentary proof of citizenship requirement to the federal voter registration form cannot be enforced. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, sided with left-wing and “civil rights” groups that had sued the Trump Administration over his executive order aimed at bolstering election integrity. The order, titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections,” directs federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Social Security Administration (SSA), and Department of State to provide states access to federal databases to verify voter eligibility and citizenship during...

Today, Judge Michael P. Maxwell of the Waukesha County Circuit Court issued a ruling in the case Cerny v. Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) that requires the WEC to verify the U.S. citizenship of ALL voter registration applicants and review existing voter rolls for non-citizens. The WEC and local officials must fulfill their duties and are barred from registering anyone without verification of US citizenship. The court also mandated collaboration between the parties to create a plan, utilizing Department of Transportation (DOT) records or other legal methods to identify ineligible registrants. This review must be substantially completed before the next statewide...

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...

Trump fumed, ‘Wasn’t she the one that married her brother in order to gain citizenship?’ In as Trumpian a fashion as it gets, the president has rekindled the years-long debate: Did progressive Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) marry her brother? Shortly after conservative icon Charlie Kirk was assassinated in cold blood by a deranged leftist, Omar reposted a video on X that called Kirk a “reprehensible human being” who was “spewing racist dog whistles” in his “last, dying words.” Republican lawmakers saw an opportunity to censure the “Squad” member and remove her committee assignments. The motion failed by a 214-213 vote....

(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 Trump administration is putting illegal aliens on notice: taxpayer-funded housing is for AMERICANS, not for those who broke the law to come here. On Friday, Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced that all Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) nationwide have 30 days to conduct audits verifying the legal status of every single tenant in Section 8 housing and other HUD-funded programs. The first housing authority to face scrutiny is Washington, D.C., where Turner confirmed that the DC Housing Authority has already been put on notice, according to Fox News. More than 3,000 PHAs across the nation are...

Gaining residency—the legal right to live in another country long-term—is a cornerstone of most offshore diversification plans. A second residency opens you up to more of the world’s possibilities and enhances your freedom. In times of crisis at home—whether social unrest or another pandemic—it provides a legitimate fallback location. On a practical level, it allows you to stay in a country you enjoy for as long as you wish, without the constraints of tourist status. A second residency can also unlock strategic advantages: preferential tax treatment, access to affordable health care, local discounts, and lower-cost education. While there are many...

The Trump administration is reinstating a long-dormant practice of conducting "neighborhood checks" to vet immigrants applying for U.S. citizenship, expanding its efforts to aggressively scrutinize immigration applications, according to a government memo obtained by CBS News. The neighborhood checks would involve on-the-ground investigations by officials at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that could include interviews with the neighbors and coworkers of citizenship applicants. The government investigations would be conducted to determine if applicants satisfy the requirements for American citizenship, which include showing good moral character, adhering to the U.S. Constitution and being "well-disposed to the good order and happiness of...

Axios co-founder Mike Allen appeared on Monday's Morning Joe to tout the outlet's article, "Trump's identity project," which begins [emphasis added]: "Through immigration crackdowns and cultural purges, President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American." Allen cites as an example: "We see this in a new question for citizenship applications, an assessment of whether they're of good moral character."Uh, Mike, hello? That "new" question has been around since 1790, in our country's very first naturalization law. It reads: "The court admitting such alien shall be satisfied that he...

US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers, expanding how an applicant’s “good moral character” is evaluated in the naturalization process. The policy, outlined in an August 15 memo, instructs officers to consider applicants’ positive contributions to society in a more “holistic” approach, rather than focusing solely on disqualifying factors. "Becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen means being an active and responsible member of society instead of just having a right to live and work in the United States," the memo stated. "Among other eligibility factors, aliens applying for naturalization must demonstrate that he or she has been and continues to be...

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.

There’s a host of issues with giving illegal aliens citizenship or legal status or a carveout — but the most consequential is voting.Democrats are increasingly explicit about their goals to turn illegal aliens into future voters — making Republican talk of amnesty or compromise more worrisome. Those efforts would be nothing less than hammering the final nails into the coffin of both the Republican Party and America.At a Fort Worth “The People vs. The Power Grab” rally, Beto O’Rourke laid it out plainly. “We absolutely failed to live up to the expectations that we set, so next time we win...

The CASA ruling has been handed down, and rogue judges and unhinged liberals are hardest hit. While it doesn’t address the issue of birthright citizenship per se, it did strike down the national injunction power that district judges have been abusing since the outset of the second Trump presidency. SCOTUSblog set up the issue: Whether the Supreme Court should stay the district courts' nationwide preliminary injunctions on the Trump administration’s Jan. 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship except as to the individual plaintiffs and identified members of the organizational plaintiffs or states. And in a 6-3 ruling, the Court ruled:...

Here’s a striking statistic: A third of all Washington, D.C., district judges (known for anti-Trump rulings) are foreign-born. Does this matter?It certainly may if they’re anything like hard-left representative Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.). She said in Spanish at a recent Mexico City summit, “I’m a proud Guatemalan before I’m an American.”Then there’s Representative Deqa Dhalac (D-Maine), who was the first female Somali-born mayor in the U.S. In a resurfaced video clip, she can be heard saying, while wearing her hijab, that she wants to “help our country” (referencing Somalia). She did catch herself and follow the quoted phrase with, “our former...

A recent U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) report highlighted critical national security failures in its Special Immigrant Juvenile (SIJ) program that allowed approximately 800 known or suspected gang members to enter the United States.The report, titled “Criminality, Gangs, and Program Integrity Issues in Special Immigrant Juvenile Petitions,” examined more than 300,000 SIJ petitions submitted from fiscal year 2013 through February 2025, according to a USCIS press release on Thursday.The report found that 198,414 SIJ petitions were approved between fiscal year 2020 and 2024, and that half of SIJ petitioners in 2024 were over the age of 18 when they...

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.