Now Trump Wants Ownership of Your Kids
First they came for the undocumented, but soon it will be anyone who questions.
The 14th Amendment is not complicated. It was written to be simple on purpose.
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.
All. Not some. Not the ones with the right parents. Not the ones whose mothers arrived with the correct paperwork. All. The men who wrote that word had just finished a war that killed 620,000 Americans. They chose it deliberately. They put it in the Constitution — not a statute, not an executive order — because they understood that citizenship is the foundational right. The right, as Chief Justice Earl Warren once wrote, to have rights. And they understood that any government that can define citizenship can un-define it.
Trump knows this. That’s the point.
On April 1 — and yes, April Fool’s Day, feel free to sit with that — the Supreme Court hears arguments in Trump v. Barbara. The administration’s position is that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause doesn’t mean what it says. That “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a carve-out big enough to drive an executive order through. That children born on American soil to undocumented parents, or parents here on visas, are not automatically citizens.
Every court that has considered this has rejected it. The Supreme Court settled it in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark — a California man born to Chinese parents, denied re-entry to his own country, vindicated by a 6-2 ruling that affirmed birthright citizenship without ambiguity. The administration’s answer to 128 years of settled law is to dig up Elk v. Wilkins — an 1884 ruling that denied citizenship to a Native American man who had left his tribe. They are citing a case built on the dispossession of Indigenous people to argue that brown babies born in American hospitals don’t belong here. That’s not legal reasoning. That’s grave robbing.
Trump said the quiet part out loud on Truth Social: “It is about the BABIES OF SLAVES.” He’s right about that, at least. The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to reverse the Dred Scott decision — the Supreme Court’s most obscene ruling, which declared that Black people, free or enslaved, could never be citizens of the United States. The citizenship clause exists because this country needed to formally repudiate the idea that the accident of birth could create a permanent underclass. What Trump is arguing is that it can. What the Supreme Court is being asked to do is ratify that argument.
I grew up in Bangladesh and Haiti — places where one person or a few select people have complete control over who is human and who isn’t. I know what it looks like when a state decides some people don’t belong. It doesn’t start with torture chambers. It starts with a Presidential order. A legal reinterpretation. A category of person who is technically present but legally provisional. I chose America because it had written something different into its foundational law. Past tense is doing a lot of work in that sentence right now.
This is not an immigration argument. This is a human argument. The administration’s theory — that citizenship flows from parentage, not birth — transforms America from a nation defined by geography and law into one defined by dehumanization and the whims of whoever currently holds power. That is not the American idea. That is the kings idea the founders explicitly rejected. It is, if you want to trace it to its logical conclusion, the idea that some people are born human and others are imposters to that condition.
Alien. There’s that word again. First it’s the undocumented. Then the visa holders. Then the naturalized. Dehumanize the category and the rest gets easier — that’s how it has always worked, in every country where it has worked. I am number three on the list. When is it my turn to have my life, painfully built at great cost, stripped from me?
Every lower court that has heard this case has ruled against the administration. Some of the conservative justices have already signaled skepticism — Kavanaugh spent a previous hearing demanding to know how hospitals would even process newborns under the new regime. The solicitor general’s answer was, essentially, we’ll figure it out. That’s the plan. A 128-year-old constitutional settlement, unilaterally rewritten by executive order, implementation details to be determined. And six justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote will decide whether that’s acceptable.
Here’s what I know about empires in decline. They don’t announce the end of citizenship. They redefine it. Incrementally. The mechanism, once established, doesn’t stay where you put it. And if you think loyalty to the regime protects you — ask what happened to members of the Nazi party who stepped out of line. They disappeared too.
I became a citizen because I believed in what the 14th Amendment meant. If this court allows an executive order to override it, then the amendment means whatever the man currently holding power says it means.
I became a citizen because I believed in what the 14th Amendment meant. If this court allows an executive order to override it, then the amendment means whatever the man currently holding power says it means.
That’s the end of the American dream I fought and bled for.