Tennessee attorney general joins legal fight against automatic birthright citizenship

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has signed on to a challenge of birthright citizenship. (Photo: John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti joined a filing Friday in the U.S. Supreme Court supporting President Donald Trump’s order to end automatic birthright citizenship.

The brief brought by Skrmetti and 24 other states’ attorneys general urges the court to clarify that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause doesn’t grant automatic citizenship to people born on American soil regardless of their parents’ residency and immigration status. 

The American Civil Liberties Union, multiple state attorneys general and immigration rights groups challenged the executive order. But Skrmetti sided with the president even though his order was blocked in early October by a federal appeals court in Boston.

“The idea that citizenship is guaranteed to everyone born in the United States doesn’t square with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment or the way many government officials and legal analysts understood the law when it was adopted after the Civil War,” Skrmetti said in a statement.

The Fourteenth Amendment says, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Yet the attorney general said the brief provides evidence from the 1860s through early 1900s backing his interpretation that citizenship required parental domicile and allegiance to the United States, not temporary or unlawful presence.

About 4.4 million U.S.-citizen children under 18 lived with at least one person without permanent legal documentation as of 2018, according to the American Immigration Council.