Kentucky AG Coleman joins brief backing Trump’s order on birthright citizenship
Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman is joining fellow conservatives in the fight against birthright citizenship, the legal concept that affords citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
Coleman joined an amicus brief filed by Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti Friday, which asked the U.S. Supreme Court to clarify that citizenship to everyone born in the United States is not guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
The brief supported President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, which has been tied up in the court case Trump v. CASA.
The order in question states that a child born in the U.S. is not automatically a citizen if the mother was unlawfully present in the U.S. and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful resident at the time of birth. It also excludes from citizenship children born of a mother who was in the U.S. on a temporary visa and the father was not a U.S. citizen.
For more than a century, courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment to confer citizenship to virtually everyone born on American soil.
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, reads.
Using historical evidence from the 1860s to the early 1900s, Skrmetti wrote in a press release accompanying the brief that courts have incorrectly interpreted the amendment.
“The idea that citizenship is guaranteed to everyone born in the United States doesn’t square with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment or the way many government officials and legal analysts understood the law when it was adopted after the Civil War,” Skrmetti wrote. “If you look at the law at the time, citizenship attached to kids whose parents were lawfully in the country. Each child born in this country is precious no matter their parents’ immigration status, but not every child is entitled to American citizenship.”
The brief also argued against birthright citizenship as a policy.
“Constitutionally conferring citizenship on the children of those who entered the country unlawfully rewards illegal behavior in a manner no drafter or ratifier of the Citizenship Clause endorsed,” it reads.
This is not Skrmetti’s first brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. His office recently won a U.S. Supreme Court case defending Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors, a case that had implications for Kentucky’s own ban.
A spokesperson for Coleman did not respond to a request for comment on the case.
Almost all Republican attorneys general signed on to Skrmetti’s brief like Coleman did. Only three of the 28 states in the U.S. with GOP attorneys general — New Hampshire, Ohio and Virginia — did not sign on.
