San Francisco took center stage on Tuesday, when the United States Supreme Court issued its final decision of the 2026 term, upholding the doctrine of Birthright Citizenship. San Franciscans played significant roles in the current case, Trump v. Barbara, in ways strikingly similar to the city’s prominence in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in 1898. Above and beyond any local connections, the set of court opinions striking down President Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship will be discussed and written about for decades to come.
Executive Order 14160, issued on the first day of the second Trump administration in 2025, would have ended the granting of United States citizenship at birth to children whose parents are legally, but temporarily, living in the United States or are living here without any immigration authorization. Ending birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants has been the Holy Grail of immigration restrictionist advocates and elected officials for the past four decades.
President Trump sought to go beyond that elusive goal by also stripping parents on graduate student visas or temporary work visas, such as Silicon Valley tech workers, the ability to bestow the security of U.S. citizenship on their children born here. In response, the City and County of San Francisco and 17 states filed suit to prevent the executive order from taking effect. In June 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected that challenge on procedural grounds but permitted a second challenge that was decided this week. This time, the attorney arguing before the Supreme Court against the executive order was Cecillia Wang, a San Francisco lawyer with the ACLU. The challenge succeeded.
Chief Justice Roberts, writing on behalf of five justices, ruled that the executive order was unconstitutional (and on behalf of six justices that it violated a federal statute). The Roberts Opinion encapsulated the four-century history of birthright citizenship, including 158 years of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution: “You’re a citizen of the United States if you’re born here.”
Birthright citizenship, as a concept in British and later American law, dates to a 1608 ruling in Calvin’s Case that established citizenship by place of birth rather than parental ancestry. Calvin’s Case was already 290 years old when, in 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered Wong Kim Ark, a San Francisco native of Chinese ancestry, to be released from government custody on the grounds that being born in San Francisco made him a United States citizen and not an immigrant to be excluded.
Birthright citizenship, as a concept in British and later American law, dates to a 1608 ruling in Calvin’s Case that established citizenship by place of birth rather than parental ancestry.
For much of the late 1800s, San Francisco’s Chinese community was beleaguered by mob violence against them at the hands of the Workingmen’s Party; local ordinances passed by the Board of Supervisors that targeted Chinese businesses and individuals; and special state taxes targeting industries where they worked. Community organizations, including the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, brought legal challenges against these measures. In one case, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down San Francisco’s denial of business licenses to Chinese-owned laundries as a violation of the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. As a result, since 1886, women, racial, ethnic, and other societal groups have relied upon the Yick Wo v. Hopkins decision to protect their Constitutional rights to equal treatment under the law.
This week, San Francisco’s anti-Chinese history was laid bare again in the five opinions issued in the Trump v. Barbara decision. Justice Thomas’s dissenting opinion, at 91 pages, one of the longest he has written in his 35-year career on the Supreme Court, is striking for its attempted erasure of Chinese Americans from the 14th Amendment. According to Thomas, “The Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in the wake of the Civil War, ‘with the one pervading purpose’ of securing equal citizenship for the freed slaves.” Yet, the status of Chinese immigrants was also considered in the Congressional debates, even by opponents of the 14th Amendment, who warned that it would extend rights to Chinese. It took California almost a century, until 1959, to ratify the 14th Amendment, in part due to anti-Chinese sentiment that continued into the 20th century.
While Justice Thomas acknowledged the “unique circumstances” of Chinese immigrants who “were met with considerable hostility,” Justice Ketanji Jackson, also African American, stingingly rebuked him in her opinion by detailing the “fever pitch” of anti-Chinese sentiment and laws in the same era and describing “universal liberty and equality interests” as motivating the 14th Amendment, not solely anti-slavery sentiment.
The Thomas opinion will likely fuel the differentiation between African American and Asian American communities on subjects like immigration, affirmative action, and criminal justice, and be the subject of internal debates within each community. On a more general level, President Trump and key Republican senators are calling for legislative reforms or constitutional amendments to overturn the decision or to deny birthright citizenship to children whose parents are so-called “birth tourists” — expectant parents who travel to the U.S. for the sole purpose of having the child who will obtain U.S. citizenship and quickly leave without any intention or legal ability to remain in the United States. Because a constitutional amendment must pass both houses of Congress by two-thirds and be ratified by three-fourths of the states to take effect, these efforts are not expected to be successful.
Two hundred fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia and the founding of the first Spanish settlement in San Francisco in 1776, the birthright citizenship debate suggests we are still defining ourselves as Americans.
