{"id":2281,"date":"2026-07-01T16:14:38","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:14:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2281"},"modified":"2026-07-01T16:14:38","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T16:14:38","slug":"the-court-gets-wong-kim-ark-wrong-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2281","title":{"rendered":"The Court gets Wong Kim Ark wrong…again"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Trump v. Barbara<\/em> that the Constitution grants automatic citizenship to children born on American soil regardless of parents\u2019 immigration status.\u00a0\u00a0Five justices signed on to that constitutional holding: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson.\u00a0\u00a0A sixth, Kavanaugh, agreed that the order had to fall, but on statutory grounds alone, declining to join the majority\u2019s constitutional reasoning.\u00a0\u00a0Three justices dissented outright.\u00a0\u00a0Between them, Thomas and Kavanaugh offered the two paths the Court should have taken instead of the one it chose.<\/p>

Read more Congress should keep America sweet for another 250 years<\/a><\/p>\n

The industry the ruling protects<\/h1>\n

This was never abstract.\u00a0\u00a0In 2019, federal agents busted three Southern California \u201cmaternity hotel\u201d operations; one bragged it had served 8,000 pregnant women, 4,000 flown in from China, at $40,000 to $80,000 a head, and pulled in $3.4 million in wire transfers in two years.\u00a0\u00a0In the Northern Mariana Islands, more babies were once born to Chinese tourists than to island residents, until a crackdown got the number under 50 a year.\u00a0\u00a0A Long Island ring billed taxpayers $2 million in fraudulent Medicaid claims for 119 births.\u00a0\u00a0Honest estimates put birth tourism at somewhere between the high teens of thousands and over 30,000 births a year, and there are upwards of 500 companies in China alone whose only product is a U.S. birth certificate.\u00a0\u00a0That is the industry today\u2019s ruling just told to reopen.<\/p>\n

The majority\u2019s sleight of hand<\/h1>\n

Roberts\u2019s opinion leans almost entirely on Wong Kim Ark<\/em> (1898), treating that case as though it already answered the question before the Court.\u00a0\u00a0It did not.\u00a0\u00a0Wong Kim Ark\u2019s parents were lawfully domiciled in the United States, permanently settled and running a business in San Francisco, subject to the ongoing jurisdiction of American law in every sense that mattered in 1898.\u00a0\u00a0The majority papers over that distinction, insisting that the domicile language was incidental rather than load-bearing.\u00a0\u00a0That is picking the holding you want and discarding the facts that produced it.<\/p>\n

The Citizenship Clause reads: born in the United States \u201cand subject to the jurisdiction thereof.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0That phrase was not decorative.\u00a0\u00a0The framers used it to exclude classes of people who owed allegiance elsewhere, foreign diplomats being the obvious example but not the only one.\u00a0\u00a0Someone unlawfully present, or present only temporarily on an expiring visa, has not placed himself under the full and permanent jurisdiction of the United States the way domicile implies.\u00a0\u00a0The majority never seriously engages this, asserting that \u201cjurisdiction\u201d means merely being subject to arrest while physically present, as though that reading were self-evident.<\/p>\n

Kavanaugh\u2019s better instinct<\/h1>\n

Justice Kavanaugh\u2019s opinion behaves like judicial restraint.\u00a0\u00a0He agreed that the executive order could not stand but got there without touching the Fourteenth Amendment.\u00a0\u00a0His view: The order conflicts with 8 USC \u00a71401(a), the existing statutory codification of birthright citizenship, and that resolves the case.\u00a0\u00a0He was explicit that the constitutional question is not straightforward, and that Congress remains free to legislate exceptions for children born to parents here unlawfully or temporarily.<\/p>\n

That is the more honest opinion in the building.\u00a0\u00a0It resolves the case without foreclosing the constitutional question for a future case, and puts the decision back where it belongs: in Congress.\u00a0\u00a0Kavanaugh didn\u2019t need to decide whether Thomas is right about domicile.\u00a0\u00a0He just declined to let the majority decide it by fiat, five votes to four, on a question the Court didn\u2019t have to reach.<\/p>

Read more The Knicks championship run: Sports remains the greatest unifier<\/a><\/p>\n

Thomas and the honest reading<\/h1>\n

Justice Thomas\u2019s dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch, does the work the majority skipped.\u00a0\u00a0It takes \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d seriously as a substantive limitation, not a formality, and does not pretend Wong Kim Ark<\/em> resolved a question its facts never presented.\u00a0\u00a0Alito\u2019s and Gorsuch\u2019s separate dissents reinforce the point from different angles: This case could have been decided narrowly, on illegal and temporary presence specifically, without the sweeping rule the majority chose to issue instead.<\/p>\n

What the majority actually did<\/h1>\n

Roberts had a narrower path available and declined to take it, the same path Kavanaugh took instead.\u00a0\u00a0Five votes was enough to win the case.\u00a0\u00a0It was not enough to settle a constitutional question this consequential for the next century.\u00a0\u00a0Instead, the chief justice chose maximalism, foreclosing any legislative fix and any future case from revisiting the question on cleaner facts, using a bare five-justice majority to do it.<\/p>\n

The dissenters did not argue for stripping citizenship from anyone currently holding it.\u00a0\u00a0Thomas argued for reading a hundred-and-thirty-year-old case for what it actually held.\u00a0\u00a0Kavanaugh argued for deciding this case narrowly and leaving the rest to the people\u2019s elected representatives.\u00a0\u00a0Both are more modest positions than the one that carried the day.\u00a0\u00a0They unfortunately lost, but they were the more careful ones.<\/p>\n

Josh Kantrow is a lawyer in Chicago, where he focuses on technology, privacy, and complex commercial litigation.\u00a0\u00a0He writes on law, politics, and culture at his Facebook page:\u00a0facebook.com\/share\/1BLwcus4PR.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>

Read more If you like your air conditioner, can you keep it?<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

\"<p><em>Image:<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

Image: Joe Ravi via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Trump v. Barbara that the Constitution grants automatic citizenship to children born on American soil regardless of parents\u2019 immigration status.\u00a0\u00a0Five justices signed on to that constitutional holding: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson.\u00a0\u00a0A sixth, Kavanaugh, agreed that the order had to fall, but on statutory grounds alone, declining to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,514],"tags":[945],"class_list":["post-2281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","category-scotus","tag-related-topics-scotus-birthright-citizenship"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Court gets Wong Kim Ark wrong...again - Interstate Logistics Hub<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2281\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Court gets Wong Kim Ark wrong...again - Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Supreme Court ruled yesterday in Trump v. Barbara that the Constitution grants automatic citizenship to children born on American soil regardless of parents\u2019 immigration status.\u00a0\u00a0Five justices signed on to that constitutional holding: Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, and Jackson.\u00a0\u00a0A sixth, Kavanaugh, agreed that the order had to fall, but on statutory grounds alone, declining to […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/?p=2281\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Interstate Logistics Hub\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-07-01T16:14:38+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/781d7266da1c0969f37f25aa47f5eaff.jpeg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"640\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"323\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"4 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/93038961905b9b4e826fad647449a9a4\"},\"headline\":\"The Court gets Wong Kim Ark wrong…again\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-07-01T16:14:38+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281\"},\"wordCount\":859,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/07\\\/54d8631f8379b5ec7d10d89bf7db006f.jpeg\",\"keywords\":[\"Related Topics: SCOTUS, Birthright Citizenship\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\",\"SCOTUS\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/interstatelogisticshubs.com\\\/?p=2281\",\"name\":\"The Court gets Wong Kim Ark wrong...again - 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