Our Supreme Court Brief in Support of Birthright Citizenship
The amicus brief, co-filed by Profs. Sherrilyn Ifill and Guy-Uriel Charles in Trump v. Barbara, reaffirms an enduring consensus that children born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents are U.S. citizens.
14th Amendment Center Staff Mar 01, 2026
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The founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at Howard University School of Law, Sherrilyn Ifill, together with Guy-Uriel Charles, the faculty director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice at Harvard Law School, filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court in Trump v. Barbara, the case in which President Trump seeks to exclude some native-born Americans from the guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Professor Ifill’s 14th Amendment seminar students provided top-flight research assistance for this brief. They include Adria Carter, Ariel Langley, Camille Odom, Naquan Bush, Reghan Daniel, and Tamya Anderson. You can read the brief at this link. It is also available as a stand-alone resource on our website.
Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the first sentence of the 14th Amendment and was meant to protect and ensure full, first-class citizenship for Black people, but also to remove from political debate or challenge, the re-creation of a caste system or tiered system of citizenship in this country.
The brief focuses on the legislative history and the boundaries of executive power under the 14th Amendment, but more intensely on the effect of the renunciation of birthright citizenship in other countries with distinct histories of racial discrimination and stratification, including the Dominican Republic and Myanmar. The lessons from those countries, and the resulting “statelessness” experienced by millions of former citizens after birthright citizenship was withdrawn from particular groups, stand as blaring warning signals for our country.
The case will be argued in the Supreme Court on April 1st. All the filings in the case, which include the merits brief for the U.S. government as petitioners and the merits brief for the challengers of the executive order as respondents, can be found at this link.
Other notable amicus briefs filed in Trump v. Barbara include:
- Amicus brief of Historians Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur
- Amicus brief of The Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, et al.
- Amicus brief of Professors Gabriel Chin, Paul Finkleman, and Erica Lee
- Amicus brief of Constitutional and Immigration Law Scholars
- Amicus brief of the Cato Institute
- Amicus brief of Black Immigrants’ Rights Organizations
