Sen. Cruz Leads Amicus Brief to SCOTUS Upholding Fourteenth Amendment, Protecting American Citizenship

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights and Congressman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio-04), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee led an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold the Fourteenth Amendment by not granting citizenship to the children of aliens unlawfully present in the United States. The decision to review the Trump v. Barbara case by the U.S. Supreme Court comes after Sen. Cruz led a cert-stage brief last year.

Excerpts from the amicus brief are below, and the full text of the brief can be viewed here.

“The Executive Order at issue here properly ensures that rule is followed within the executive branch, but the lower court nonetheless enjoined the Executive Order. This Court should reverse.

“United States law was the same: in 1855, Congress enacted a law dictating that ‘persons heretofore born, or hereafter to be born, out of the limits and jurisdiction of the United States, whose fathers were or shall be at the time of their birth citizens of the United States, shall be deemed and considered and are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States,’ except for ‘persons whose fathers never resided in the United States.’

“For all these reasons, as this Court held over a century ago, the touchstone for birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment is total allegiance to the United States, rather than merely being subject to its laws or some subset thereof.”