Curtis Files Amicus Brief for Aoki Center at UC Davis Law and Scholars in Birthright Citizenship Case

On February 26, 2026, acting as pro bono counsel, a Curtis team filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies at the University of California, Davis School of Law, and a coalition of constitutional, civil rights and other scholars led by Prof. Evelyn M. Rangel-Medina in Trump v. Barbara. The question presented is whether President Trump’s Executive Order 14,160—aimed at ending birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented parents or those with temporary legal status—violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

The District Court for the District of New Hampshire certified a nationwide class of babies that would be covered by the Executive Order and preliminarily enjoined the order—joining every court that has reached the question in holding that it would violate the Fourteenth Amendment and the INA. The amicus brief argues that the Executive Order threatens to re-create the very lineage-based citizenship structure that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended to repudiate, because of the order’s disparate impact on racial minorities particularly descendants of Latino/e immigrants. The brief presents demographic data of the disparate impact and elaborates on the potential for intrafamilial and intergenerational harm. The amicus brief is available here.

The Curtis team was led by Juan Perla, and included Herman Ferré, Robert García, Joseph Muschitiello, Steven Thomas, Faith Banjoko, and Nathan Mosher.