Donald Trump’s legal team is citing racist and xenophobic legal arguments in a bid to get the Supreme Court to allow the president to strip birthright citizenship.
The administration is hoping that the nation’s highest court will side with Trump as he attempts to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, with legal arguments in the high-profile case beginning Wednesday.
As The Washington Post reports, Trump’s legal team, including Solicitor General D. John Sauer, is referencing arguments from three lawyers who had previously attempted to remove birthright citizenship using anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism to bolster their own case.
This includes Alexander Porter Morse, an attorney who was a Confederate officer during the Civil War. In their Supreme Court brief, Trump’s team cites the views of Morse—who also argued against granting Black Americans the right to vote after slavery was abolished and opposed other Reconstruction amendments—as evidence that not everyone agreed with the idea that all people born in the United States are citizens when the principle was enshrined in the 14th Amendment.
Trump’s legal argument also cites Francis Wharton and George D. Collins, two lawyers who pushed anti-Chinese sentiment while arguing against birthright citizenship in the late 1800s. In 1898, the Supreme Court ruled that Wong Kim Ark—who was born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants—was a U.S. citizen, paving the way for birthright citizenship that Trump is now trying to overturn.
Wharton had pushed the archaic legal argument that birthright citizenship could apply to children of European immigrants but not those of Chinese descent.
He suggested that Chinese people were insufficiently “civilized” for Americans to tolerate them becoming U.S. citizens, arguing that doing so would amount to allowing “foreign barbarism.”
Collins similarly argued to the Justice Department that children born in the U.S. to Chinese immigrants should not be granted citizenship because they were “antagonistic to our civilization” and “utterly unfit” to become Americans.
Justin Sadowsky, an attorney for the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance (CALDA), wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief that the three lawyers cited by Trump’s team were attempting to “ride the rising tide of anti-Chinese” sentiment to strip birthright citizenship.
“Relying on new theories of international law and anti-Chinese policy arguments, the arguments of these three lawyers were unoriginalist. They were racist,” Sadowsky wrote.
“This Court should not allow the writings of anti-Chinese racists of the late 19th century to harm the rights of Chinese and other people here in the United States today by adopting their reasoning.”
In a statement to the Post, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said: “The Supreme Court has the opportunity to review the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause and restore the meaning of citizenship in the United States to its original public meaning. This case will have enormous consequences for the security of all Americans.”
Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship sets up another major showdown with the Supreme Court. In February, the conservative-majority court ruled against Trump by declaring his global tariffs illegal.
Last week, Trump blasted Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett—two of his own nominees who voted to strike down his signature tariff plans—saying they “sicken” him and are “bad for our country.”
In a Monday morning Truth Social rant, Trump said that birthright citizenship is not about “rich people from China” or the rest of the world, who want their children “and hundreds of thousands more, FOR PAY, to ridiculously become citizens of the United States of America. It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!
“We are the only Country in the World that dignifies this subject with even discussion. Look at the dates of this long ago legislation -THE EXACT END OF THE CIVIL WAR,” Trump added. “The World is getting rich selling citizenships to our Country, while at the same time laughing at how STUPID our U.S. Court System has become (TARIFFS!).”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
