Bay Area lawyers in Washington DC for Supreme Court birthright citizenship case

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — Lawyers from the Bay Area are in Washington D.C. to argue before the Supreme Court Wednesday in a case challenging a Trump executive order that banks birthright citizenship.

The Bay Area has a deep connection to birthright citizenship. It’s a landmark case that affirmed the right began in San Francisco.

Birthright citizenship seemed to have been settled as a constitutional right for more than 150 years.

In 1868, the 14th Amendment was adopted to grant more rights to freed slaves.

It says all persons born in the U.S. are citizens of the U.S.

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But on the first day of his second term in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to ban birthright citizenship.

Aarti Kohli is the Executive Director of the Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco, one of the organizations challenging the executive order.

“What’s at issue is can the president rewrite the Constitution. And basically we are arguing that birthright citizenship is clearly stated in the 14th Amendment and that the Supreme Court actually already decided this issue in 1898,” Kohli says.

That 1898 case is firmly rooted in the Bay Area.

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco. But when he tried to re-enter the U.S. after a visit to China, his citizenship was questioned because his parents were Chinese immigrants.

“The 14th amendment says all persons born or naturalized in the United States. It says nothing about parents. The word parents is not in the 14th amendment,” Kohli explains.

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The Supreme Court back then agreed. Birthright citizenship was later codified as a statute by Congress.

Wong Kim Ark’s great grandson still lives in the Bay Area. He will rally in front of the Supreme Court Wednesday in favor of birthright citizenship.

“Most Americans in this country owe their citizenship to birthright citizenship. The ones that don’t are the Indigenous people,” says Norman Wong, Wong Kim Ark’s great grandson.

The case Wednesday will be argued by Cecilia Wang, the National Legal Director of the ACLU in California. She’s the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants who were in the U.S. on student visas. She would not have been a U.S. citizen without birthright citizenship.

“That she would be the one to defend that before the current court feels very meaningful and poignant to me,” says Winnie Kao, Asian Law Caucus Senior Counsel, who is part of the legal team challenging the executive order.

She says overturning birthright citizenship would marginalize 250,000 children each year.

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“Hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born children would be stripped of birthright citizenship, the citizenship of other Americans would be called into question. Whole swaths of U.S. law that are premised on birthright citizenship would need to be re-examined,” Kao says.

The impact would extend beyond immigrants in the country illegally or on visas.

“Right now, you give birth in a hospital, you hopefully can name your child within three days. You sign the piece of paper. And the hospital sends it on to the Social Security Administration. And within a few weeks, you have a social Security number for your baby. And now what the government will have to do is investigate the immigration status of, the parents of the baby. And so you will have to prove that you yourself are a citizen or a green card holder. So just imagine the bureaucratic mess that that’s going to create,” Kohli says.

Like many laws in the U.S., birthright citizenship is based on British common law.

The United Kingdom however, got rid of birthright citizenship in 1983.

However, most countries in the Americas still have birthright citizenship.