Ancestry at the Center of the Birthright Citizenship Case

Nine Supreme Court justices will decide whether birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment endures after President Trump's 2025 executive order to end automatic citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants or people in the U.S. on temporary visas; lower courts have blocked the measure. The piece also traces each justice's ancestry—from Roberts' English and Slovak roots to Sotomayor's Puerto Rican heritage and Jackson's enslaved-African lineage—showing how personal histories intersect with this defining constitutional question.