The birthright-citizenship case is different. It is both more real and less abstract than any other case on the court’s docket, save perhaps for those involving capital punishment. It is about whether the president of the United States can denaturalize millions of U.S. citizens at a whim, deprive them of the Constitution’s full protections, and then subject them to deportation from the country where they were born—indeed, from the only country they have ever known.
Earlier this month, the last wave of briefs were filed in the case ahead of oral arguments on, perhaps appropiately, April 1. Some of them are more notable than others; I’ll get to them later. But perhaps the most powerful one comes from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the organization representing the Catholic hierarchy in the United States.
None of those briefs are as blunt and unsparing as the one submitted in Barbara. While the bishops make some legal arguments, they are ultimately secondary to the moral and spiritual ones contained in the text. “At its core, this case is not solely a question about citizenship status or the Fourteenth Amendment,” they argued. “It is a question of whether the law will affirm or deny the equal worth of those born within our common community—whether the law will protect the human dignity of all God’s children.”
Those priorities, both theological and practical, are reflected in the bishops’ brief. “Birthright citizenship accords with the Church’s teachings concerning the State’s obligation to uphold and protect human dignity because it treats birth within a community as a sufficient and objective basis for political belonging,” the conference wrote. “The Church teaches that equal human dignity is inherent in the mere fact of personhood and does not depend on citizenship, immigration status, or parentage.”
A core theme is the harm that the Trump administration will do to untold numbers of children. By its own terms, Trump’s executive order only applies to children born on or after a certain date in 2025. A Supreme Court ruling in his favor that narrows the Citizenship Clause would allow him to go much further, of course. But for now, the bishops warn, the priority is on those who would be harmed if the administration prevails.
Children born to undocumented immigrants, the bishops warned, would face an “impossible choice” if the court redefines citizenship: they could either live a diminished life in America, “forever being an underclass citizen, with limited access to the necessities of life, such as healthcare, education, housing, and the right to vote,” or, alternatively, they could be “forced to migrate to a country that they have never known and in which they may not be welcome.”
Other references are much cruder. Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy aide and the architect of his mass-deportation campaign, has called on the conservative movement to “take all necessary and rational steps to save Western civilization.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has told supporters that “Western Christianity” is under siege by “dangerous and godless foreign ideologies that sow doubt, confusion and death.”
To the extent that there is a legal dispute here, it is a wholly contrived one. Some lawyers and legal scholars have tried to bootstrap a justification for Trump’s executive order, almost exclusively after the fact. Among them are Ilan Wurman, a professor at the University of Minnesota who has made the audacious claim that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” excludes “illegally present aliens” and “temporary sojourners.” The Justice Department’s own brief largely borrows from his writings on the matter.
Not to worry, Wurman wrote in his brief, because the drafters were actually operating based on a long legal tradition that includes the Magna Carta, safe-conduct letters for German merchants in the Holy Roman Empire, various court rulings that predate the Citizenship Clause’s adoption, and other cherry-picked sources that indicate citizenship is actually based on “allegiance” and a sovereign monarch’s offer of protection. “Protection was essential to jurisdiction, and permission was necessary for protection,” Wurman claimed.
I have little doubt that the Supreme Court is unafraid of committing constitutional heresies. Few could be greater than United States v. Trump, where they turned the presidency into a turnkey dictatorship without any basis in American law and tradition. Hopefully the briefs submitted by the bishops, originalist legal scholars, and a small army of other law professors and organizations will save them from moral and human disaster as well. To do otherwise would be an even greater crime than the case that required the Fourteenth Amendment in the first place. At least Roger Taney didn’t have Dred Scott to learn from.
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