Forgotten Dairies
Trump vs Constitution: Birthright Citizenship Battle Explodes -By Fransiscus Nanga Roka
Birthright citizenship was never merely about immigration. That was the point in a nation defined by laws, not lineage. For now at least, the Supreme Court has kept that notion intact.
The United States has just experienced a constitutional crash test that reveals an underlying crisis: Is citizenship a legal right or a political club?
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a narrow 6–3 vote ruled against the effort by Donald Trump on behalf of former president´s executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship for children that are born to individuals who entered illegally or had temporary visa status holders. In the first, Chief Justice John Roberts penned a majority opinion right out of the Fourteenth Amendment playbook, reaffirming an principle that was once thought to be inviolable: if you are born in America, you are American.
But this decision is not just a legal fix. It is a political indictment.
Trump building upon a Restrictionist narrative that dates back a while now by presenting birthright citizenship as a kind of popular “magnet for illegal immigration” he hereby intended to wrestle back, repackaged the whole thing into ‘executive power’. Not only is this not its policy intent, but also the manner. By trying to use an executive order to circumvent a constitutional amendment, Trump stretched the limits of presidential power in ways that frighten constitutional scholars around the world.
This was the easy part, and so it should have been no surprise when the Court made its rejection of its own demographic engineering clear: The Constitution is not a toy.
But it is the backlash from conservative circles that hints at something more sinister. By urging the fight to move to Congress, they are indicating a new battlefield from a battle of overreach which is executive overreach to legislative redefinition. It is not a retreat, it is a recalibration. If constitutional guarantees can be politically recomposed as policy desires, then citizenship itself is negotiable.
The ruling is a win for civil rights advocates but an uncomfortable one. It retains the legal doctrine of jus soli while revealing the precariousness it has developed in modern political discussion. The fact that the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, a principle flowing from post-Civil War equality, can be openly questioned represents a broader collapse of constitutional consensus in America.
This case has ramifications on the world stage as well. For decades, the U.S. has held itself up in the world as a beacon of constitutionalism most particularly in protecting individuals against state power. Yet, that moral claim withers away when even core protections such as citizenship are placed at stake in a partisan titanic struggle. And elsewhere, nations struggling with migration, nationalism and identity politics are paying close attention learning.
The relevant question will not be whether or not the Fourteenth Amendment survives this moment. It likely will. The question for which we need to seek an answer is whether its spirit equality before the law can survive serious political attack.
This failed order will legally die, but the ideology undergirding it is still alive and well. It embodies a much larger trend in the movement towards exclusivist nationalism, which redefines legal categories in accordance with political objectives. So in a way, the Supreme Court did much more than protect a clause; it effectively put down an inviolable line against the normalization of constitutional distortion.
But there is still much action yet to be played out! The court, if Congress accepts the challenge becomes Capitol Hill, where legal precision yields to political accommodation.
This is where the real danger lies not in an isolated EO but rights as chips to be sold away.
Birthright citizenship was never merely about immigration. That was the point in a nation defined by laws, not lineage. For now at least, the Supreme Court has kept that notion intact.
But preservation is not permanence.
The Constitution survived this test. The question is, however, if American politics will.
Fransiscus Nanga Roka
Faculty of Law University 17 August 1945 Surabaya and Managing partner Law Firm Victorious Indonesia
