Senate holds hearing on birthright citizenship ahead of Supreme Court arguments

The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution is convening a hearing on ending automatic birthright citizenship this week, ahead of a Supreme Court ruling that could redefine who is considered an American at birth.

Latest developments: The March 10 hearing precedes the Supreme Court’s April 1 oral arguments in Trump v. Barbara, with a decision expected by late June or early July. The case centers on President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20, 2025 executive order, which would deny citizenship to U.S.-born children whose parents are in the country unlawfully or on temporary visas. The administration maintains that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship guarantee was never meant to extend beyond the formerly enslaved.

Multiple federal courts have blocked the order, including two appeals courts. Yet the Supreme Court’s June 2025 intervention offered little resolution as the justices sidestepped the constitutional question and instead restricted the reach of nationwide injunctions. Justice Sonia Sotomayor called that ruling “nothing less than an open invitation for the government to bypass the Constitution.”

Why this matters: More than 150,000 newborns could be denied citizenship under the order annually, with AAPI families on work or student visas among those most affected. California alone could see an estimated 24,500 children denied citizenship under the order each year. Central to the legal dispute is United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the 128-year-old Supreme Court ruling establishing that being born on U.S. soil made a child a citizen, regardless of the parents’ nationality. The executive order directly contradicts that precedent.

An overturn would carry stark consequences. For instance, Bruce Lee, who was born at San Francisco’s Chinese Hospital in 1940, would be deportable under the new policy. For Asian American communities, that precedent is not a technicality but a hard-won safeguard, and one that courts upheld even as Chinese immigrants faced naturalization bans and exclusionary laws. Birthright citizenship was, for generations, the one constitutional guarantee that stuck.

What critics are saying: Immigrant rights organizations have filed an amicus brief in Barbara v. Trump, arguing the policy would produce “generations of stateless individuals.” Thu Nguyen, executive director of OCA–Asian Pacific American Advocates, warned that the order would “create chaos, deny children equal protection under the law and inflict lasting harm on immigrant families and AAPI communities nationwide.”

In a separate filing, a coalition of 24 state attorneys general co-led by California’s Rob Bonta asked the Court to strike down the order. The coalition also warned that the order’s implementation could threaten federal Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program funding tied to beneficiaries’ citizenship status. The American Bar Association (ABA) raised practical concerns as well, warning that because no centralized national registry captures parental immigration status at birth, establishing citizenship under the new standard would frequently prove “difficult or impossible to obtain.”