Grim warning as Supreme Court weighs letting Trump rewrite what it means to be American

President Donald Trump's team will throw their weight behind a Supreme Court immigration case, an analyst has suggested.

A case set to appear before the legal body on April 1 will hear whether the president's executive order restricting birthright citizenship can remain in law. Scott Titshaw, a professor of law, and Stephen Yale-Loer, a retired professor of immigration law practice, suggested that an unconstitutional precedent could be set if the Supreme Court sides with Trump.

Trump signed the birthright citizenship restriction into law on Jan. 20, 2025. The Legal Defense Fund sued the president shortly after the announcement was made.

Writing in The Hill, Titshaw and Yale-Loer argued the stability of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment had been called into question. The pair wrote, "The stakes could not be higher. If the court sides with Trump, the damage will ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants.

"It will affect legal visa holders, green-card holders and even U.S. citizens. It would also create an underclass of American-born children, some of whom would become stateless.

"For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed that nearly everyone born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen. That guarantee, enshrined after the Civil War to extend citizenship to former slaves, has been a cornerstone of American identity. Trump’s order seeks to dismantle it by executive fiat."

The pair suggested the framing from the Trump administration on why a birthright citizenship ban has been acted on is insincere.

"The administration frames its order as a crackdown on illegal immigration," they wrote. "But the machinery it proposes would ensnare children of citizens, green card holders, and legal workers who built their lives here in good faith."

They also warned that it could create a "bureaucratic nightmare."

"For more than a century, birthright citizenship has provided a simple, stable rule that affirms a core American principle: the circumstances of one’s birth should not determine one’s place in the nation.

"If the Supreme Court allows that principle to be undone, the result will not be a tidier immigration system. It will be a more uncertain nation — one in which even children born on U.S. soil must prove, again and again, that they belong."