The Independent67%
Supreme Court live: Trump makes historic move to attend arguments on birthright citizenship case 0%
By Alex Woodward0%
4/1/2026, 12:25:45 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Framing Effect, Negativity Bias, and Quote-first Misdirection, with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 32.4% saturation with 358 hits. Analysis detected 1,446 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,104 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 0% and a BS Rank of 0% (0 of 16,813 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 100.00% of the article peer group.
President Donald Trump is set to make an unprecedented visit to the Supreme Court today to hear oral arguments in a landmark case over his fight to end birthright citizenship.
No sitting president has attended Supreme Court arguments in the nation’s history.
Proceedings are set to begin at 10 a.m.
“I'm going,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office earlier this week.
“I think so.
I do believe.
Because I’ve listened to this argument for so long.”
Trump’s attendance has raised questions about the separation of powers with critics blasting the move.
Justices will determine whether Trump can unilaterally redefine who gets to be an American citizen with the stroke of a pen, after the president signed a sweeping executive order in an attempt to deny automatic citizenship to newborns of certain immigrant parents.
That order was almost instantly challenged by states, civil rights groups and pregnant immigrants who argued the order violates the 14th Amendment and a long-held principle that nearly every person born in the U.S. is a citizen.
The case before the court is among an avalanche of legal challenges against the Trump administration as the president tests the limits of his executive actions.
A decision is expected by June or July.
How did the case get here?
Today’s hearing actually marks the second time within Trump’s second term in office that the Supreme Court has heard a case involving legal challenges against his birthright citizenship order.
Last year, the justices heard a case involving the scope of nationwide injunctions issued by several federal judges against his executive order.
Courts across the country struck down Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from newborn Americans born to certain immigrant parents, but the administration argued those decisions should be limited to the individual states — and pregnant mothers — who sued him and won.
During oral arguments in that case, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the administration’s position a “catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime,” where court orders would protect only the individuals in a case, not the millions of Americans who could be impacted.
The justices ultimately ruled that judges went too far with their rulings, which “exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to the federal courts,” according to the ruling.
But the Supreme Court did not touch the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause at the center of the fight.
Those legal battles resumed, and Trump appealed to the Supreme Court once again asking explicitly whether the 14th Amendment “provides that those ‘born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’ are U.S. citizens.”
That’s the question before the justices this morning.
Trump officials cite racist scholars and white supremacists in case before Supreme Court, critics warn
In their briefs to the court, Trump administration lawyers cite several scholars who campaigned against birthright citizenship in the 1800s, a movement fueled by anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism in the aftermath of Reconstruction and a rise in anti-immigrant views.
At the time, a group of anti-immigrant scholars advanced the argument that the 14th Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” excluded the children of Chinese immigrants.
The Supreme Court was unpersuaded.
A landmark decision in the case of United States v Wong Kim Ark in 1898 held that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to virtually everyone born in the country.
The Trump administration has cited those scholars throughout its argument to the court to revisit the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause more than a century later.
What does Trump's executive order say?
Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, which he signed on his first day back in the White House, would deny citizenship to newborns if their mother was “unlawfully present” or had “lawful but temporary” status, and if the father “was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.”
The 14th Amendment states that “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.”
For more than 100 years, the Supreme Court has upheld the definition to apply to all children born within the United States.
Critics have warned that allowing the president to effectively rewrite a core component of the 14th Amendment would create a patchwork system of constitutional rights and citizenship benefits, including the right to vote.
Tens of thousands of newborns would be denied citizenship every year under Trump’s order, opening the door for stateless families with mixed citizenship status and uneven constitutional rights, according to the plaintiffs.
How many babies are born with parents without legal status?
In 2023, about 300,000 babies were born in the U.S. to parents without legal status, according to NPR.
Those babies had been granted citizenship in the past - but Donald Trump is looking to change that.
If his executive order stands, those babies would not be granted automatic citizenship.
What is birthright citizenship?
Birthright citizenship is when babies born in the U.S. are automatically granted citizenship.
The 14th Amendment has long been interpreted to give citizenship to any person born - regardless of whether their parents are citizens- inside the U.S. or one of its territories.
The 14th Amendment reads:
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.
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Quiet night at the Supreme Court
Images show a quiet night at the Supreme Court, before a historic day when Donald Trump becomes the first president to attend arguments
No president has ever attended Supreme Court arguments
No U.S.
President has ever attended Supreme Court oral arguments - but Donald Trump is not one for tradition.
On Wednesday, Trump is set to visit the Supreme Court and break a tradition that has been around since 1790.
Trump announced plans to attend and hear arguments on whether his move to end birthright citizenship is Constitutional.
"The case is about the powers of the presidency as an institution," Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, told NBC News.
"By showing up in person, the President would instead be personalizing the case, as if it’s a personal confrontation between him and the justices."
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