SCOTUS Decision Upholding Birthright Citizenship Favors Amici Represented by Curtis Pro Bono

On Tuesday, June 30, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which sought to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. to undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders. In a majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts, the Court held that the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizenship to virtually all people born on U.S. soil, reaffirming the longstanding interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Barrett joined the constitutional ruling, while Justice Kavanaugh joined in the judgment only on statutory grounds. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissented.

The Curtis team filed an amicus brief in the case 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. The amicus brief argued that the Executive Order threatened 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 presented demographic data on the disparate impact and elaborated on the potential for intrafamilial and intergenerational harm.

The Curtis team was led by Juan Perla and included Hermann Ferré, Robert García, Joe Muschitiello, Faith Banjoko, and Nathan Mosher.