Earlier this month, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case Trump v. Barbara, challenging Executive Order No. 14160, which declared that individuals born in the United States after February 20, 2025, are not US citizens if neither parent was a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Trump even attended the oral argument, the first time a sitting president has done so — because the issues contested in Trump v. Barbara are central to the MAGA agenda, going far beyond just those whose citizenship is impacted.

The three plaintiffs in the case either had temporary status or were in the process of obtaining legal status: Barbara, a pregnant Honduran asylum applicant; Susan, a Taiwanese citizen on a student visa with a one-year old; Mark, a Brazilian applicant for permanent residence whose son was born last year and initially received a US passport. The case is about the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment: “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.” The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing the plaintiffs, relies on the decades of legal precedent that have interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to extend birthright citizenship to everyone who was born in the United States, regardless of the status of their parents — making Trump’s executive order blatantly unconstitutional.

Constitutional scholar Evan Bernick has argued that the attack on birthright citizenship is not unconstitutional but anti-constitutional, “reconfigur[ing] the Reconstruction Constitution into a means of perpetrating the very evils that abolitionists and Republicans sought to eradicate from our constitutional order.” The Fourteenth Amendment is one of these Reconstruction amendments.