The Asian American Legal Defense & Education Fund today filed arguments in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in support of birthright citizenship on behalf of 78 Asian American and legal groups.
They were joined by the Korematsu Center for Law and Equality and the Center for Civil Rights and Criminal Justice in opposition to Trump’s efforts to deny citizenship to all born in the United States.
Birthright citizenship has been the law of the land since Wong Kim Ark of San Francisco won his U.S. Supreme Court case establishing this right in 1898.
“This new attack on birthright citizenship repeats our country’s history of targeting and excluding Asians,” said Bethany Li, executive director of AALDEF. “We already won this fight more than a century ago. But no matter the gains, unfortunately being Asian in America means constantly having to fight for our right to be here. Asian Americans are coming together once again to defend our right to citizenship and to call this country home.”
In its friend of court brief to the Federal Appeals Court in San Francisco, the groups argued that overturning this right would endanger existing birthright citizens of being stripped of their citizenship.
“It is all too easy to imagine the government taking the next step and trying to strip citizenship retroactively from those who were born on U.S. soil before February 19, 2025, and have lived their entire lives—from their first breaths—as U.S. citizens, the groups wrote.
It pointed to the example of South Asian American and Hindu Bhagat Singh Thind who had been naturalized a U.S. citizen, but in 1923 lost it after the supreme court ruled he did not qualify because he wasn’t White. An additional 50 Indian Americans subsequently lost their citizenship they had been previously granted as a result.
16 years earlier after the Expatriation Act of 1907 became law, the courts stripped American women of their citizenship because they married foreign nationals.
In a separate action today, the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law filed an amicus brief also in support of birthright citizenship.
The committee filed its brief on behalf of the NAACP, League of Women’s Voters and the Equal Justice Society.
“By attempting to strip birthright citizenship from native-born Americans, it threatens to resurrect a shameful, exclusionary past and create a legally inferior underclass—disproportionately harming communities of color and silencing future generations in our democratic voting process. We cannot allow this dangerous erosion of our democracy to stand,” said Janette McCarthy Wallace, NAACP chief general counsel.
President Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office in January overturning birthright citizenship, but three separate courts stepped in to stop the order from taking effect.
Earlier courts had ruled birthright citizenship is enshrined in the 14th amendment.
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