Trump v. Barbara is the Supreme Court’s most significant interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause since United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Supreme Court held Executive Order 14160 unconstitutional because it sought to restrict access to birthright citizenship based on parental immigration status. The litigation, however, reveals a deeper constitutional struggle over inherited legal status. As we grapple with the rise of white supremacy, Justice Jackson’s concurrence reminds us that the Reconstruction Amendments were designed to dismantle systems of race-based subordination.

This Article draws on citizenism to explain how restricting access to birthright citizenship based on formally race-neutral immigration and citizenship status reproduces racial hierarchy. Drawing on national origin data for undocumented and temporary-status populations, it demonstrates that efforts to re-whiten U.S. citizenship, such as Executive Order 14160, fall disproportionately on mixed-status families of color. According to demographic evidence, Indigenous, Black, Latinx/e, and Asian and Pacific Islander communities would bear the greatest burden, with Mexican-origin families comprising the largest affected group. In doing so, the Article offers a constitutional and empirical account of how citizenship restrictions can perpetuate racial subordination without relying on explicit racial classifications.

This Article further demonstrates how these restrictions transmit legal vulnerability across generations. The foreseeable multigenerational harms include increased inequality within the family structure, heightened vulnerability to economic exploitation, worsening health disparities, and a greater risk of statelessness. Without intervention, as people of color become the majority of the U.S. population, racial hierarchy will be recreated under citizenism, thereby undermining the multiracial democratic foundations established by the Reconstruction Constitution.

Continue reading Blood, Soil, and Race: The Perils of Shredding the Fourteenth Amendment.