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birthright citizenship
The 14th Amendment Is 160 Years Old Today—And We Are in Serious Trouble
From the courageous radicalism of Thaddeus Stevens to the tragic depths Donald Trump has brought us, our nation has become horribly lost on what it means to be a citizen and why this democratic republican was created in the first.
May 06, 2026
On May 6, 1866, exactly one hundred and sixty years ago today, Thaddeus Stevens, US Congressman from Pennsylvania and the leading Radical Republican in the House of Representatives, rose to introduce the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution on the floor of the. Stevens, chair of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, was also co-chair of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction set up by Congress, in late 1865, to promote a radical Reconstruction, a program advanced over the consistent objections of President Andrew Johnson.
Here is how Stevens introduced the Amendment:
Congress tasked the committee with reconstructing the nation and setting new constitutional baselines for post-Civil War America; this is difficult work; above all, we are trying to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution. But I beg gentlemen to consider the magnitude of the task which was imposed upon the committee. They were expected to suggest a plan for rebuilding a shattered nation—a nation which though not dissevered was yet shaken and riven by the gigantic and persistent efforts of six million able and ardent men; of bitter rebels striving through four years of bloody war. It cannot be denied that this terrible struggle sprang from the vicious principles incorporated into the institutions of our country. Our fathers had been compelled to postpone the principles of their great Declaration, and wait for the full establishment till a more propitious time. That time ought to be present now. But the public mind has been educated in error for a century. How difficult in a day to unlearn it. In rebuilding, it is necessary to clear away the rotten and defective portions of the old foundations, and to sink deep and found the repaired edifice upon the firm foundation of eternal justice. If, perchance, the accumulated quicksands render it impossible to reach in every part so firm a basis, then it becomes our duty to drive deep and solid the substituted piles on which to build. It would not be wise to prevent the raising of the structure because some corner of it might be founded upon materials subject to the inevitable laws of mortal decay. It were better to shelter the household and trust to the advancing progress of a higher morality and a purer and more intelligent principle to underpin the defective corner.
The Amendment passed in the House on June 13, by a vote of 138 in favor and 36 opposed, having passed in the Senate five days earlier, on June 8, by a vote of 33 in favor and 11 opposed. In other words, roughly a quarter of US Representatives and Senators, serving in houses of Congress that did not include representatives from the seceded Confederate states, voted against the amendment.
It is tempting to imagine that the establishment of egalitarian citizenship in the aftermath of a bloody Civil War fought in its name proceeded as a matter of course. But it did not. It was bitterly contested, by everyone aligned with the Confederacy, but also by many Northern Democrats, who rallied behind Andrew Johnson’s efforts to quickly reincorporate the eleven defeated Southern states without substantially empowering emancipated formerly enslaved people or enforcing any form of retributive justice. And it is been bitterly contested ever since.
Stevens and his Radical Republican allies in Congress understood the strength of the opposition to their vision of a multi-racial and non-racist democracy, and they fought a decade-long battle on its behalf, centered on both enforceable legal and civic equality and land reform designed to empower formerly-enslaved agricultural laborers. They succeeded in many ways, passing numerous bills designed to support the civil rights and economic opportunities of emancipated Blacks, and securing passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Yet the gains were short-lived, betrayed by the infamous Compromise of 1877 that placed Republican Rutherford Hayes in the White House and ending the final remnants of the Union’s military occupation of the South, leading in short order to the reinstitution of Black subordination via the new Jim Crow system of racial segregation and extortionate share-cropping. (While there have been many fine histories of this period, to my mind the best is Eric Foner’s award-winning Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877.)
The Fourteenth Amendment was the cornerstone of the effort to truly reconstruct the postwar nation on the foundations of non-racial citizenship. In the words of historian T.J. Stiles, it was “The Constitutional Amendment That Reinvented Freedom”: “It established birthright citizenship, required ‘due process’ and ‘equal protection’ of the law for everyone, and put the federal government in the business of policing liberty. It removed race and ethnicity from the legal definition of American identity.”
Stevens was one of the principal legislative proponents of the Amendment. And, as President Johnson consistently sought to obstruct such efforts, he was one of the ring leaders of the 1868 effort to impeach Johnson. Indeed, he succeeded in this effort—Johnson was famously impeached by the House on February 24, 1868, by a vote of 126-47-- though Johnson was eventually acquitted in the Senate by the narrow margin of 35-19, one short of the 2/3 majority necessary to convict.
As Bruce Levine notes in his terrific 2021 political biography, Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice, Stevens was reviled and calumnied by opponents of Reconstruction, both in his lifetime and long into the 20th century. William A. Dunning, the dean of “Lost Cause” historians, described Stevens in 1907 as “truculent, vindictive, and cynical.” Writing in 1931, James Truslow Adams called Stevens “the most despicable, malevolent and morally deformed character who has ever risen to power in America.” James G, Randall, writing in his influential 1937 The Civil War and Reconstruction, similarly described him as “filled with ‘vindictive ugliness, unfairness, intolerance, and hatefulness,’” a view carried over into the 1969 edition of the book, co-edited with David Donald, the textbook assigned in the Civil War class I took at Queens College in 1976. The most enduring image of Stevens was produced not in a book but in a film, D.W. Griffith’s 1915 “Birth of a Nation,” one of whose chief protagonists, Austin Stoneman—an ugly, club-footed, lecherous hypocrite—was clearly modeled on Stevens.
Woodrow Wilson was only slightly less harsh, writing on “The Reconstruction of the Southern States” in The Atlantic in 1901: “He had no timidity, no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy, no regard or thought for the sensibilities of the minority, — being rough-hewn and without embarrassing sensibilities himself, — an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”
It is true that Stevens seemed to have little timidity, and appears to have been something of a pit bull in his refusal to let the cause of Reconstruction go. It is also true that he had “no scruples about keeping to constitutional lines of policy,” but only in this sense: he sought, with his colleagues, to revolutionize the “constitutional lines of policy” that had already been decimated by a Civil War, and to use the Constitution’s own Article V process to amend the Constitution. Stevens was a constitutional revolutionary—the point of Levine’s brilliant book--and thus “an ideal radical for the service of the moment.”
Like everything about the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment was hardly self-enforcing. This was understood by its drafters, which is why they included the language of Section 5: “Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article” (both the Thirteen and the Fifteenth Amendments contain similar language). Every aspect of the Amendment remained hotly contested for a century after its passage. But in the 1960’s, after decades of intense struggle by a civil rights movement that faced daily attacks on life and limb, Congress finally passed two pieces of legislation designed to enforce the 14th and the 15th Amendments—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Like the above-mentioned amendments, these landmark pieces of legislation faced strong opposition, and did not pass without legislative battle. The first passed in the House by a vote of 290-130 and in the Senate by a vote of 73-27; the second passed the House by a vote of 328-74 and the Senate by a vote of 79-18. And as is well known, the passage of these laws helped to generate a powerful backlash against any form of racial liberalism.
That said, both the basic intent behind the acts, and the federal bureaucracies established to enforce them, became more or less settled features of US law for the past half-century—until now.
To be fair, the Voting Rights Act has been besieged ever since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby v. Holder decision. The Court’s 6-3 decision this week in Louisiana v. Callais further eviscerated the Act.
At the same time, we are currently witnessing a wholesale assault on the 14th Amendment, and the entire legal system established to enforce it, by the Trump administration. The examples are loud and clear: the outright attack on birthright citizenship, which is currently before the Court; the obvious suspension of due process by the DHS-ICE regime of arrest, detention, and deportation that in the past year has swept up well over 500,000 Americans; and the use of the Justice Department—first established in 1870 to oversee the rule of law in the formerly-Confederate states—to threaten and punish “political enemies.”
Perhaps nothing better symbolizes this Trumpist rejection of the 14th Amendment than the second Trump presidency itself. We should not forget that very powerful arguments were advanced, by numerous reputable conservative legal scholars, including J. Michael Luttig, to justify keeping Trump off several state ballots in 2024, on the grounds that his incitement of the January 6, 2021 insurrection violated the 14th Amendment’s Section 3. In spite of these arguments, the Supreme Court ruled against such moves in March 2024, holding that only Congress could attempt such a maneuver. Trump, his candidacy bolstered, went on to win the 2024 election, and then proceeded, on day one of his second term, to pardon or commute the sentences of every one of the over 1200 people who had been convicted of crimes on for their role in the January 6 insurrection.
Under Trump 20.0, even the barest lip service to the notion of equal justice under the law has been abandoned with contempt.
It is a sad irony of history that this is all happening as the nation prepares to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and that Trump goes about the task of destroying constitutional democracy even as he makes extravagant plans to celebrate “America 250.”
And it is simply sad, and outrageous, that 160 years after Thaddeus Stevens announced the intention “to write the Declaration of Independence’s promise of freedom and equality into the Constitution,” Donald Trump is doing his best to trample on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the very idea of liberal democracy.
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Trump’s Gold Card Is Birth Tourism
The president's true criticism about birth tourism is not that it is occurring—it’s that someone else is profiting from it.
Apr 07, 2026
On April 1, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in Trump v. Barbara, the class-action lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
Trump insists that this ban is necessary to stop birth tourism. This refers to the practice of traveling to another country to give birth, thereby allowing the child to automatically acquire citizenship. Via TruthSocial, Trump writes: “Birthright Citizenship has to do with the babies of slaves, not Chinese Billionaires who have 56 kids, all of whom ‘become’ American Citizens. One of the many Great Scams of our time!”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer has raised similar concerns. He remarks, “Media reported as early as 2015 that, based on Chinese media reports, there are 500—500—birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China, whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation.”
However, despite their criticisms, the Trump administration has effectively launched their own birth tourism venture: the “Trump Gold Card,” a visa program that expedites the process for those “who have demonstrated their ability and desire to advance the interest of the United States” by donating $1 million dollars and paying a $15,000 Department of Homeland Security (DHS) processing fee. The “Trump Corporate Gold Card” requires a $2 million contribution paid by a corporation “or similar entity” on behalf of the individual. There is even a “Trump Platinum Card” reportedly coming soon. That card will require a $5 million contribution and makes the visa holder exempt from paying US taxes on non-US income for 270 days.
Trump is not ending birth tourism. His true goal is to seize control of the market by monopolizing the pathways to legal residency and citizenship.
Once approved, either variant of the Gold Card provides successful applicants with “lawful permanent resident status” as an EB-1 or EB-2 visa holder. (Specific details for the Platinum Card are not yet available, but presumably it would grant recipients permanent resident status as well.)
This is significant because of how it relates to Trump’s birthright ban. The Trump administration alleges that the 14th Amendment only grants citizenship to those who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US by virtue of owing it “direct and immediate allegiance” and receiving “protection” from it. The children of US citizens and lawful permanent residents meet this standard because their parents have “a permanent domicile.”
Trump’s birthright executive order explicitly carves out this exception: “Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the entitlement of other individuals, including children of lawful permanent residents, to obtain documentation of their United States citizenship.”
Importantly then, the US-born children of Trump Gold Card recipients will be automatically granted citizenship at birth—this is true regardless of how the Supreme Court rules.
Trump is not ending birth tourism. His true goal is to seize control of the market by monopolizing the pathways to legal residency and citizenship. This is a hostile takeover. While Trump decries the problem of “Chinese billionaires” scamming the US to get citizenship for their children, his Gold Card programs allow them to directly purchase it. After all, who else but a multimillionaire or billionaire could afford the $1 million (or $5 million) price tag? Once they obtain lawful permanent resident status, what stops them from giving birth to “56 kids” in the US?
The “Corporate Gold Card” paves the way for even relatively poorer immigrants to gain permanent residency so long as they have skills that companies desire. Rather than curtailing the birth tourism market, Trump is expanding it!
Moreover, a Gold Card applicant may include their spouse or unmarried children (under 21 years old), thereby ensuring they too “receive all of the privileges conferred” by the program. While each family member is subject to another $15,000 DHS processing fee and a $1 million donation, this is unlikely to be a barrier for the ultra wealthy.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick claims, “Our immigration system should put Americans first. That’s exactly why the Trump Gold Card is a major win for our country.” Trump likewise exclaims: “Wealthy people will be coming into our country by buying this card. They’ll be wealthy, and they’ll be successful, and they’ll be spending a lot of money, and paying a lot of taxes and employing a lot of people.”
The irony is that Trump wants wealthy, successful, and talented people to migrate to the US. He wants this regardless of how much his anti-immigrant base despises it. His criticism about birth tourism is not that it is occurring—it’s that someone else is profiting from it.
Ultimately, the Gold Card is gaudy, illegal Trump-branded birth tourism. If Trump were serious about tackling this issue, he would immediately end his pay-for-stay scheme. But he won’t. He will insist, despite any evidence, that birth tourism is rampant and poses an existential threat to the nation; while, at the same time, getting in on the action himself. This isn’t because Trumpian birth tourism is superior or better for the nation. It’s because it’s better for him. In the end, there is only one citizen that Trump truly cares about: himself.
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The DR's Anti-Birthright Escalation Is a Cautionary Tale for the US
Racism and bigotry can never become the basis for deciding who gets rights and who belongs; families should never be stripped from their homes for the sake of violently manufacturing an ethnostate.
Apr 02, 2026
On April 1, the Supreme Court began hearing arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a class-action lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s executive order to ban birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.
Every lower court that has ruled on this issue thus far has found this executive order to be straightforwardly unconstitutional—and they are correct. The 14th Amendment is clear: “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 Trump administration contends that to be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means one must owe “direct and immediate allegiance” to the United States and receive “protection” from it. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argues that the children of US citizens and formerly enslaved persons meet this test by virtue of having “a permanent domicile”—a permanent home they intend to stay indefinitely. By contrast, the children of undocumented immigrants “do not owe primary allegiance to the United States by virtue of domicile” because their parents “lack the legal capacity to establish domicile here.”
This reading adds much to the Citizenship Clause that is clearly not present. No plausible interpretation would assume that the drafters meant anything about loyalty, allegiance, or domiciles.
Ultimately, Trump’s birthright restrictions, like those implemented in the DR, are nothing more than racism and xenophobia masquerading as legitimate policy.
Those challenging the Trump administration argue: “The government is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations. The Order may be formally prospective, applying to tens of thousands of children born every month, and devastating families around the country. But worse yet, the government’s baseless arguments—if accepted—would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”
This warning should be taken seriously. We have already seen similar events play out in the Dominican Republic (DR).
In 1997, the mothers of Dilcia Yean and Violeta Bosico requested that the local registry office provide them with a copy of their daughters’ birth certificates. Without it, the children could not enroll in school and were at risk of deportation. While both Yean and Bosico were born in the DR to Dominican mothers, their fathers were Haitian temporary workers. On that basis, the registry denied their mothers’ request. This blatantly discriminatory denial effectively rendered the girls rightless and stateless.
Under the 1994 Dominican Constitution, both girls were entitled to birthright citizenship. Per the Constitution, citizenship is granted to “all persons born within the territory of the Republic, with the exception of the legitimate children of foreigners residing in the country in a diplomatic capacity or those who are in transit therein.” Important here is the “in transit” clause. As Ernesto Sagás notes, “This clause was originally designed to address the issue of children born on ships passing through Dominican ports, and whose parents were not intending to settle in the Dominican Republic.” However, over the years, politicians had argued (and at times acted as if) that clause extended to the children of temporary workers, like Yean and Bosico.
After years of obstruction from government officials, the mothers finally succeeded in obtaining their daughters’ birth certificates in 2001.
In 2003, the case was submitted to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). In court, the DR denied any wrongdoing. Rather, they defended a broad definition of “persons in transit” based on its 2004 General Migration Law (Ley No. 285-04). Under that Law, “temporary workers” were formally classified as “persons in transit.” The DR argued that Yean and Bosico were not Dominican nationals themselves because their fathers were Haitian temporary workers—their fathers were “in transit,” thus they too were “in transit.” The IACHR rejected this reasoning.
If the Supreme Court has any legitimacy left, they will do the right thing and end Trump’s birthright madness.
In September 2005, the IACHR ruled that the DR had violated several of the girls’ rights under the American Convention of Human Rights, including their right to a nationality, equal protection, and humane treatment. The IACHR ordered the Dominican government to award the girls $8,000 USD each, issue a public apology, and amend their domestic laws to make the procedure for acquiring birth certificates “simple, accessible, and reasonable since, to the contrary, applicants could remain stateless.”
In October 2005, the Senate of the Dominican Republic issued a resolution rejecting the IACHR’s decision. In December 2005, the Supreme Court of Justice of the Dominican Republic, in further defiance of the IACHR, upheld the General Migration Law’s broad definition of “persons in transit.”
In 2010, the DR took matters one step further by formally amending their Constitution. Under the 2010 Constitution, citizenship is granted to “persons born within the national territory, with the exception of the children of foreign nationals who are members of diplomatic and consular missions, of foreigners who are in transit or residing illegally within Dominican territory. Any foreigner defined as such under Dominican laws shall be considered a person in transit.” Importantly, this redefinition divorced the concept of “person in transit” from any notion of temporary stay. A person could, for instance, live continuously in the DR for years and still be considered “in transit.”
Initially, this did not impact people who already had Dominican citizenship. But in 2013, that too changed. The Constitutional Court of the Dominican Republic retroactively applied the new standard to all persons born between 1929 and 2010. The Court ordered the government to thoroughly review all birth registries within that period and remove any persons who no longer count as Dominican under the new guidelines. In the decade that followed, this ruling would strip as many as 245,000 Dominicans of their citizenship and trigger a humanitarian crisis.
Up to 86% of those impacted have been Dominicans of Haitian descent. This is no accident. It reflects the historical and persistent discrimination against Haitians rampant across the DR. The 2013 ruling made legal what people like Santiago Riverón, the mayor of Dajabón, at the Dominican-Haitian border, have long since thought. In an interview with journalist Marius Loiseau, Riverón claims that, “Haitians and Dominicans are like water and oil.” He continues, “They have already begun to invade us for good.”
Dominican President and Trump ally Luis Abinader echoes these sentiments. He remarks: “The rights of Dominicans will not be displaced. Our identity will not be diluted. Our generosity will not be exploited. Here, solidarity has limits.” He insists that stricter penalties against undocumented migrants are necessary to ensure that the “violence that is destroying Haiti will not cross over to the Dominican Republic.”
In October 2024, his administration announced plans to deport up to 10,000 undocumented migrants per week. Between then and March 2025, more than 180,000 people were forcibly deported to Haiti by Dominican officials. These mass deportations have fueled discrimination and racial profiling, excessive violence, arbitrary detention, and family separation as well as numerous human rights violations.
While there are many important differences between the DR and US, on the issue of immigration, the parallels are unmistakable. The Trump administration is also motivated by the belief that immigrants, including Haitians, pose an existential threat to the nation’s identity; that they are a serious risk to public safety; as well as a strain on social, political, and economic resources. Like Riverón and Abinader, President Trump insists that, given the scale of the “invasion,” aggressive immigration enforcement is necessary. This includes imposing denaturalization and immigrant arrest quotas. Even the formal justification for restricting birthright citizenship is similar. For both the Trump administration and the Dominican government, no matter how many years they have lived in the country or how long they intend to stay, an undocumented immigrant is always “in transit.” They never obtain a “permanent domicile.” The Dominican government does and the Trump administration aims to extend the purported ‘transientness’ of the parents to their children as a justification for denying them citizenship.
Ultimately, Trump’s birthright restrictions, like those implemented in the DR, are nothing more than racism and xenophobia masquerading as legitimate policy. If the Trump administration succeeds in restricting birthright citizenship, it—or a future MAGA presidency—will likely seek to build upon this ruling. Like the Constitutional Court of the DR, the Supreme Court may eventually rule to retroactively apply their decision to all persons born after the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
Racism and bigotry can never become the basis for deciding who gets rights and who belongs; families should never be stripped from their homes for the sake of violently manufacturing an ethnostate. What happened in the DR should be a cautionary tale for those of us in the US.
If the Supreme Court has any legitimacy left, they will do the right thing and end Trump’s birthright madness. That said, Trump cares little for democracy or the rule of law; regardless of how they decide, we will need to remain vigilant to protect ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities.Keep ReadingShow Less
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