Trump v. Barbara · ¶388

If Wong Kim Ark were so “simple” in establishing the Court’s rule as to temporary visitors, ante, at 16, that meaning was seemingly lost on many. As a Department of Justice report confirmed in 1910, a dozen years after Wong Kim Ark, “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 . . . 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, Assistant Attorney-General, p. 124. The Citizenship Clause’s reference to “jurisdiction” “does not mean that jurisdiction to which the bodily form of the child is subject from the moment of its birth,” but instead that “larger jurisdiction, which, though difficult to define, is well known and understood, the difference…

slip opinion, revised 7/01/26
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