Trump v. Barbara · ¶275

Government officials generally agreed. In 1910, a Department of Justice report explained that “it has never been held, and it is very doubtful whether it will ever be held, that the mere act of birth of a child on American soil, to parents who are accidentally or temporarily in the United States, operates to invest such child with all the rights of American citizenship.” Spanish Treaty Claims Comm’n, Final Report of William Wallace Brown 124. The Citizenship Clause did “not mean that jurisdiction to which the bodily form of the child is subject from the moment of its birth . . . but that larger jurisdiction, which, though difficult to define, is well known and understood, the difference between the jurisdiction which is exercised over a visitor and that over one domiciled, which difference may be seen at a glance.” Id., at 125.

slip opinion, revised 7/01/26
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