When a baby is born, anywhere in the United States, the nation almost always gains a new citizen. That status makes a child a permanent member of American society. Tomorrow morning, that guarantee under the U.S. Constitution will be at the center of a special hearing at the Supreme Court.
Normally, by this time in its calendar, the Court has finished holding public hearings, and is spending its time writing opinions to decide cases it has heard earlier in the term. But it will go to the bench tomorrow, to hear three combined appeals by the Trump Administration.
The Administration, as part of a broad campaign to reduce the rights and status of non-citizens living in or visiting this country, is seeking broad power to deny “birthright citizenship” to tens of thousands of new babies.
President Trump, on his first day in office in his second term, issued an Executive Order with the uplifting title of “PROTECTING THE MEANING AND VALUE OF AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP.” What it does to achieve that, in reality, would be to narrow the meaning of the part of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment that promises citizenship at birth in this country.
The order would deny that right to babies born to parents who are in the U.S. illegally, because they entered without permission, or those parents who are living here legally but only temporarily – to work, study, tour or visit.
“Birthright citizenship,” of course, was written into the Constitution in 1868 as part of this nation’s attempt to undo the longstanding denial of citizenship to racial minorities, in particular the children of slaves brought here involuntarily.
The question before the Court at tomorrow’s hearing: Will the Court forbid lower court judges to issue nationwide orders forbidding the government from enforcing the President’s January 20 order?
If the Court only weighs that question, it will be of historic importance. But it also has the option of questioning the constitutionality of what the President’s order would do to narrow citizenship rights for newborn babies.
For those who follow this platform, the range of choices open to the Court at the hearing and in deciding this controversy was explained in detail in an earlier report, available at this link:
https://lyldenlawnews.com/2025/04/25/how-will-the-court-rule-on-citizenship/
Reading that will be adequate preparation for listening to the hearing. The purpose here is to provide a listener’s guide.
The Court will broadcast “live” the audio (no video) of Thursday’s hearing on its homepage, supremecourt.gov To listen, click on “Live Audio” and follow the prompt when the courtroom scene appears lower on the page. (The C-Span TV network will also broadcast the audio, but that is scheduled for its C-Span 3 network; one must have an account to access that network.)
The hearing is scheduled for one hour, but the Court seldom limits itself to the allotted time, especially when the controversy is very important and when there are more than two lawyers making arguments to the Court.
At promptly 10 a.m., Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., will open the hearing, announcing the case of Trump v. CASA and the cases consolidated with it.
The first lawyer will be D. John Sauer, who is the Solicitor General at the Justice Department, the highest-ranking government lawyer to appear in Supreme Court cases. Before joining the Trump Administration, he was a private attorney in St. Louis. Last year, while still a private lawyer, he represented Donald Trump before the Court and won a sweeping guarantee of legal immunity for wrongdoing by the former President.
Sauer is allotted 30 minutes, but questioning by the Justices almost certainly will prolong that time. He will be the lawyer who both opens and closes the argument, because his side filed these appeals and thus has the burden of proving the case against the lower court orders under review.
The other half of the argument, scheduled for 30 minutes but almost surely lasting longer, will be split between two lawyers who will defend the lower court orders at issue. First will be the state Solicitor General of New Jersey, Jeremy M. Feigenbaum. He represents the three states that successfully challenged the Trump order and won nationwide courts orders barring its enforcement. (Those three are Maryland, New Jersey and Washington.)
The third lawyer will be Kelsi Brown Corkran, who is director of Supreme Court practice at the Georgetown University Law School in Washington, D.C., and formerly was a private attorney. She will be arguing tomorrow as representative of the women and the civic organizations that successfully pursued cases in the lower courts.
Each of the three attorneys will be allowed five uninterrupted minutes to summarize their points, followed by two rounds of questioning by the Justices. The first round will be questions from the Justices in the order of seniority; the second round will be questions by Justices whenever they wish to join in.
With no other hearings before the Court tomorrow, this one probably will last a minimum of two hours. The Court is not expected to announce a decision until later in its term, which is scheduled to go through June and perhaps into early July.
