As the Supreme Court prepares to rule on President Trump’s executive order, millions of immigrant families are watching closely. The case could have significant implications for California, home to the nation’s largest immigrant population.
The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on the constitutionality of his birthright citizenship order. Trump signed it on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, amid his Republican administration’s broad immigration crackdown. The idea has faced skepticism from conservative and liberal justices alike.
In April, Trump posted on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”
In fact, about three dozen countries, mostly in the Americas, guarantee automatic citizenship to children born on their territory — among them, Canada, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and of course, Mexico.
President Donald Trump insists the U.S. is the only nation to do so as he seeks to deny birthright citizenship for children whose parents are living in the country illegally or have temporary legal status.
Vivianne Petit Frere’s brightly painted Haitian restaurant sits blocks from the towering U.S. border wall in Tijuana.
Called Lakou Lakay, the name in Haitian Creole means “home,” and it reflects her family’s deepening roots in their adopted homeland where her granddaughter was born two years ago, automatically making her a Mexican citizen.
Like the United States, Mexico extends citizenship to children born within its borders.
There are no figures on how many children born to noncitizens have received Mexican birthright citizenship. Tens of thousands of Haitians are living in Mexico. In 2021, when Mexico saw a significant increase in Haitian migration, at least 10 percent of arriving Haitian women were pregnant, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.
Citizenship and birth
In the U.S., birthright citizenship was enshrined after the Civil War through the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, in part to ensure former slaves would be citizens.
The right was expanded to immigrants’ children in the late 1800s when the Supreme Court ruled nearly anyone born in the U.S. — no matter their parents’ legal status — has citizenship.
The practice, many legal historians believe, dates to the 1600s and 1700s, with European rulers encouraging migration to the expanding American colonies. Those colonists, though, wanted any of their children born overseas to retain European citizenship.
So even as the colonial boundaries shifted “you’re a citizen as long as you’re born within the domain of the king, of the monarch,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “But the legal tie between the home country in Europe and the settlers remained strong through the promise of birthright citizenship.”
Dominican Republic removed birthright citizenship
In 2007, the Dominican Electoral Council officially ordered the denial of citizenship to all children born to parents without legal status.
Six years later, a Dominican court applied it retroactively to 1929.
Over a decade later, as many as 130,000 people remained stateless despite passage of a law in 2014 to correct the court decision after it drew strong international condemnation, according to the Center for Migration Studies of New York. The law now impacts the next generation, which remains vulnerable to deportation.
