A majority of the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday was skeptical of the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to exclude from birthright citizenship the children of people who are undocumented or temporarily in the United States and its territories.

In arguing the case - which was discussed in an oral session with President Trump present - U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer asserted that the constitutional citizenship clause refers to persons domiciled in the country, “who are lawfully present and intend to remain (under U.S. jurisdiction) permanently.”

“The examples you give to back that up seem very strange to me...children of ambassadors, children of enemies during a hostile invasion, children on warships. And then you extend it to a whole class of undocumented immigrants here in the country. I’m not sure how you can get to that large a group from such small and somewhat idiosyncratic examples,” Chief Justice John Roberts said.

In response to Sauer’s argument that birthright citizenship should be eliminated for children of people who entered the United States on a tourist visa, Roberts asked the attorney general how common such cases are.

“No one knows for sure,” Sauer responded, noting that this is a new world. Roberts added that it may be “a new world, but it’s the same Constitution.”

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.”

The amendment was adopted after the infamous “Dred Scott” case, decided in 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that African Americans were not entitled to U.S. citizenship and that Congress had no authority to prohibit slavery.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson held that to emphasize the domicile of individuals would be to leave it up to Congress to interpret the constitutional citizenship clause.

Sauer has indicated that loyalty and support for the United States is key in determining who should be a U.S. citizen.

“It is well known that, according to public law, an alien, while in the United States, must obey the laws of this country,” said, for her part, Puerto Rican judge Sonia Sotomayor, who - in a previous case, like Jackson and the other liberal, Elena Kagan-, had made clear her rejection of the Trump administration’s intention to limit the right to U.S. birthright citizenship.

Upon questioning by Sotomayor, Solicitor General Sauer rejected seeking to overturn the Supreme Court’s ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which confirmed that a child born in San Francisco, California, to parents of Chinese, with residence and business in the United States, without being diplomats or government officials of China, became a U.S. citizen at birth.

“We are not asking you to overturn the Wong Kim Ark ruling,” Sauer stated in answering Sotomayor’s question.

Sauer said they also do not seek to strip citizenship from those already born to undocumented parents, and recognizes Native Indians as U.S. citizens.

The focus of the case is on the six conservative judges.

At least two conservative votes will be required to invalidate the decree of Trump, who became the first U.S. president to attend a U.S. Supreme Court oral hearing and who has pressured judges in cases related to his public policy.

In his second administration, Trump - who left the court after Solicitor Sauer’s initial filing - has also maintained a policy aimed at deporting people with irregular immigration status, including people who are protected by a court order or administrative decree.

Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett questioned what happens if you don’t know who the parents of the newborn are. “Who is going to adjudicate those cases?” she asked.

“These are marginal cases,” Sauer responded, to which Barrett admonished him, “but where does that leave the Constitution?”

“If someone came here in 1868 and established domicile, that was perfectly legal, regardless of the immigration laws. So why wouldn’t we conclude that the fact that someone is undocumented is irrelevant?” asked conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, was not impressed by Sauer’s allusion that many of the world’s nations reject the concept of birthright citizenship. “We try to interpret American law with American precedent, based on American history,” Kavanaugh said.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito appeared to support the Trump administration’s general arguments on the grounds that there is a different scenario than 1898. “What we are facing is something unknown at that time: illegal immigration,” Alito said.

On the liberal side, Justice Kagan argued that Sauer has used “rather obscure sources to arrive” at his concept of who should be a U.S. citizen by birth.

“Everyone born in the U.S. is subject to U.S. juridiction,” said Cecillia Wang, director of legal affairs for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization that has challenged President Trump’s executive order.

In her first argument at a U.S. Supreme Court oral argument, Wang defended the right to U.S. citizenship for anyone born on U.S. soil, an issue close to her heart.

Wang was born in Oregon at a time when her parents, originally from Taiwan, were studying in the United States and were not naturalized U.S. citizens.

For Wang, the attorney general threw away his case by stating that they are not seeking to overturn the 1898 case law in the Wong Kim Ark case. Moreover, she insisted that the citizenship clause sought to avoid leaving the debate over birthright U.S. citizenship in the hands of Congress.

“Ask any American what our standard of citizenship is, and he will tell you that everyone born here is an equal citizen. That standard was enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment so that no government official could destroy it. If the government’s theory is accepted, the citizenship of millions of Americans, past, present and future, could be called into question,” Wang said.

“I leave the court today thinking about my parents and so many of our parents and ancestors,” Wang told reporters at the conclusion of the oral session.

More than a hundred professors, in an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief, warned that “with few exceptions, the children whose citizenship would be withdrawn under the Order are not children of visitors to the United States, but children born in the United States. who will know only the United States as their home.”

It is estimated that about 250,000 children are born annually in the United States to unauthorized immigrants.

The Supreme Court’s decision is expected by the end of June, at the close of this session.

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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.