If Birthright Citizenship Is Conditional, No One Is Safe

Since the Trump administration began attacking birthright citizenship, the focus has largely been on migrants’ children. But it is also an attack on over 280,000 international adoptees like me, whose citizenship rests on the same legal foundation now being destabilized. 

Although the 14th Amendment established birthright citizenship in 1868, its meaning wasn’t clarified until decades later by a Supreme Court decision that made later statutes like the Child Citizenship Act of 2000 possible. The act, which granted adoptees automatic citizenship, rests on the same constitutional logic: that citizenship flows from jurisdiction, not ancestry. Without that interpretation, the legal foundation that allowed adopted children of U.S. citizens to become citizens themselves collapses.

President Donald Trump’s executive order narrows the meaning of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” in the 14th Amendment, reopening the idea that citizenship can be conditional and limited by category. It legitimizes race-based exclusions and increases the risk faced by adoptees whose status was never fully secured. If the Supreme Court allows this reinterpretation to stand, U.S. immigration law will change for the worse. This is a constitutional question about who gets to belong. 

Birthright citizenship in the U.S. rests on the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause as affirmed by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco in 1873 to “parents of Chinese descent and subjects of the Emperor of China, but domiciled residents,” according to the case record. In 1895, after returning from a short trip to China, he was denied entry into the U.S. on the pretense that he was not a citizen. 

On March 28, 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed Ark’s citizenship in a 6-2 ruling. The ruling reiterated pre-established restrictions on birthright citizenship. But by and large, they concluded that the 14th Amendment was purposefully written in universal terms: “The Amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born, within the territory of the United States, of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States.” The majority also held that later exclusion laws could not override this constitutional rule. What Wong Kim Ark settled was not only a question of law, but a principle of belonging. 

Republicans under Trump are using an overturned and outdated line of reasoning, arguing that this ruling is a misinterpretation of the 14th Amendment. They claim it was meant to guarantee only formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants citizenship. In May, Trump posted on Truth Social: “Remember, it all started right after the Civil War ended, it had nothing to do with current day Immigration Policy!” 

Their argument draws directly on Chief Justice Melville W. Fuller’s dissent of the 1898 ruling. Fuller argued that Ark was still subject to foreign sovereignty because his parents were Chinese citizens, which disqualified him for citizenship. Fuller also believed that Congress and the president, through naturalization laws and treaties, had the authority to exclude “all persons of a particular race, or their children,” from citizenship. 

This logic does not remain confined to legal theory once the government claims the power to decide who belongs. In South Korea, that power was exercised through an international adoption system built on exporting mixed-race or poor children, the “unwanted,” out of the country. Once citizenship becomes conditional for one group, it becomes conditional for everyone whose status depends on legal interpretation rather than bloodline.

Korean-born adoptees know what it means to have citizenship denied. Many of us were never recognized as citizens of South Korea. We were classified as “stateless nonpersons” under a system that strictly followed patrilineal jus sanguinis, or blood right through the father, until the 1997 Nationality Law amendment. If our birth fathers were non-Korean, unmarried to our Korean mothers or absent from our adoption paperwork, the state did not recognize our mothers’ citizenship as sufficient to pass on to their children. We were barred from entry into the household registration system (hoju), now known as the Family Relations Register.  

My own adoption file lists me as an orphan hojuk, listing me as the head of my own family — despite the fact that both of my biological parents were alive. Orphanhood was purposeful because only children stripped of legal ties could be reassigned to another state. It’s not difficult to see how similar logics could reemerge.

Even after arriving in the United States, our citizenship remained uncertain. My American birth father was not listed or present at the time of my adoption, so his citizenship could not be verified. As a result, I was not legally American either. I would not become a full U.S. citizen until I was 6 years old.

Korean adoptees were not automatically granted citizenship through adoption until the Child Citizenship Act of 2000. At adoption, we were granted a special immigrant visa (IR-3 or IH-3), which allowed us to come to the U.S. and become permanent residents. But our adopted parents had to file timely paperwork, like the N-600 (Application for Certificate of Citizenship), to naturalize us. Many of them did not realize they had to.

The Child Citizenship Act of 2000 built on Wong Kim Ark’s ruling because it clarified citizenship rights for children born outside the U.S. to American citizen parents. Although it addresses a different scenario, its foundation is the interpretation embedded in Wong Kim Ark, which is the definition of “subject to the jurisdiction.” You cannot have one without the other.

Unfortunately, the Child Citizenship Act did not ensure citizenship for all of us. It left somewhere between 30,000 and 70,000 Korean adoptees behind. If you were born prior to Feb. 27, 1983, you were not included. So, if your parents didn’t naturalize you, you’re out of luck. Most adoptees won’t even realize they aren’t citizens until they apply for a Social Security card or a passport. The adoptees that do know live in fear. 

Since 2002, 11 adoptees have been deported to South Korea — a country they don’t remember, where they can’t speak the language and that may never have granted them citizenship in the first place. There is a petition calling for this loophole to be closed, but time is running out if the Supreme Court decides in Trump’s favor. 

This is the danger of rehashing settled constitutional ground. When citizenship becomes open to political pressure it stops functioning as a right and becomes something that can be granted or withheld on a whim. Trump’s effort to narrow the meaning of the 14th Amendment will re-legitimize a legal logic that leaves international adoptees like me in an unstable position. We may not be his immediate targets, but history suggests that once the state claims the power to decide who truly belongs, that power is exploited. 

Birthright citizenship has protected generations of Americans precisely because it removed the government’s ability to decide who belongs and who does not. If that protection weakens, the question of who belongs is no longer settled by law, but by whoever holds power next. Consider this: If the president can decide who can be a citizen, how much longer until he bars all persons of your particular race — or your children?