By

John Fritze

4 hr ago

PUBLISHED Mar 31, 2026, 4:00 AM ET

Donald Trump Immigration Supreme Court

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People hold a banner as they participate in a protest outside the US Supreme Court over President Donald Trump’s move to end birthright citizenship on May 15, 2025.

Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images/File

In the 26 years since she fled Colombia for the United States, “Pilar” has received her working papers, graduated high school, established a career as a paralegal and purchased a home in Florida.

But under the legal theory President Donald Trump is defending at the Supreme Court to end automatic birthright citizenship, the 35-year-old mother who asked to be identified as Pilar, is “temporarily present.” And if the 6-3 conservative court allows Trump’s executive order to take hold, her future children would effectively become stateless.

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When the Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday over Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, the administration’s top appellate attorney is expected to focus on illegal immigration and “birth tourism.” What has received far less attention are the millions of people, like Pilar, who have lived in the country legally for years or even decades, but who would nevertheless be swept up by the policy.

Some are permitted to live and work in the United States through humanitarian programs, such as the Obama-era DACA policy. Others have been waiting for years for the government to review asylum claims. By one estimate, if Trump’s order took effect, the children of as many as 6.5 million people who are living in the US legally could be denied citizenship.

“I don’t have a paper that says I’m an American,” Pilar, whose child is part of the class action before the court, told CNN in an interview, “but this is all I know.”

Pilar and others interviewed for this story sought anonymity because they fear repercussions from speaking out during a time when the Trump administration has cracked down on both illegal and legal immigration.

The plaintiffs challenging the administration are also anonymous in court records. The name “Barbara” in Trump v. Barbara – the appeal now pending before the Supreme Court – is a pseudonym for a Honduran national seeking asylum.

The meaning of ‘domicile’

The birthright citizenship case, among the most significant the Supreme Court will consider this year, deals with a central promise Trump made on the campaign trail. The Justice Department is asking the high court to sign off on an executive order the president signed on the first day of his second term that reimagines the way the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause has been understood for more than a century.

Every other court to consider that request has denied it.

The case turns on the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Trump’s attorneys have trained their focus on the second part of that clause: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” That line, they say, excludes immigrants in the country illegally.

“Children of temporarily present aliens are not completely subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction and so do not become citizens by birth,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in written arguments earlier this year. “In the debates leading to the amendment’s ratification, members of Congress recognized that children of aliens ‘temporarily in this country’ are not citizens.”

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Trump and his allies say the language was never intended to automatically entitle foreign nationals to citizenship for their children. When the framers included the words “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” they say, that meant that birthright citizenship would be extended to people who have a “direct and immediate allegiance” to the United States. One clear way to establish that allegiance, the government says, is to be “domiciled” in the country and not just allegedly passing through.

But the groups fighting Trump’s order say none of those words — allegiance or domicile — are anywhere in the text of the 14th Amendment. And, they say, it’s hard to argue that people like Pilar are not domiciled in the United States.

“Domicile means living somewhere with the intent to remain there indefinitely or permanently,” said Cecillia Wang, national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, who will square off with the government during the oral arguments Wednesday.

“If people’s citizenship depends on whether their parents intended at the time of their birth to reside in the US permanently, how would you even implement that?” Wang added.“It depends on subjective intent.”

A DACA recipient, Pilar was brought to the United States by her mother when she was 9 years old, fleeing instability and violence that rocked Colombia at the time. She was pregnant when Trump was inaugurated and described being “a little freaked out” when he made good on his promise to sign the executive order. When her daughter was born late last year, Pilar rushed to get a passport for her.

Now, she wonders if she’ll be able to do so if she decides to have another child.

“I come from a big family,” she said. “Our dream was always to have three or four kids, but now I think about it.”

Immigrant advocates say there is a disconnect between the administration’s stated goal and how the order would work in practice.

“The government wants to focus on birthright tourism as though that’s the majority of people,” said Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project. “The majority of people are people like Pilar who live here legally and who have a life in the United States.”

Returning is a ‘death sentence’

For many immigrants living in the US legally, returning to their homeland isn’t an option.

“Lily” came to the United States from Ukraine four years ago after Russia attacked her city in the early days of the full-scale conflict between the two countries. She is in the United States legally under a humanitarian program the Biden administration created in 2022 called Uniting for Ukraine.

Last year, Trump discussed possibly ending that program for some 240,000 Ukrainians.

“We’re not looking to hurt anybody, we’re certainly not looking to hurt them, and I’m looking at that,” Trump told reporters at the White House last March. “There were some people that think that’s appropriate, and some people don’t, and I’ll be making the decision pretty soon.”

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But an announcement never came and Lily and tens of thousands of others have continued to benefit from the program as the war continues. Returning to Ukraine, she told CNN, would be “like a death penalty.”

Since arriving in the United States, Lily has earned a college degree, found work and settled in Pennsylvania. She and her husband had a son late last year, about a month after the Supreme Court handed down a decision in another more technical case involving Trump’s birthright citizenship order.

“We found shelter in the United States, and my baby was born here,” Lily told CNN. “It’s not just a legal issue for me. It’s about a right to belong and to feel safe and to have a stable future.”