Trump officials cite white supremacists in bid to end birthright citizenship

An argument heading to the Supreme Court is built in part on a post-Civil War campaign that scholars say was steeped in anti-Black and anti-Chinese racism.

March 30, 2026 at 5:00 a.m. EDT Today at 5:00 a.m. EDT
9 min
By Justin Jouvenal


Demonstrators rally in support of birthright citizenship outside the Supreme Court in May. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

Alexander Porter Morse, a Confederate officer during the Civil War and a Louisiana attorney, argued for legalized segregation in the landmark 1896 Supreme Court case that established the “separate but equal” doctrine and buttressed Jim Crow laws.

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Donald Trump Wants You to Forget Why the Fourteenth Amendment and Birthright Citizenship Exists

Trump's crackdown on teaching slavery and Reconstruction isn't a culture war distraction. It's the instruction manual for his constitutional agenda.

Kevin M. Levin
https://substack.com/@kevinmlevin
Mar 30, 2026

https://substack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com/public/images/a8bad159-7831-4d86-8d09-fa5a884e12dc_1200x900.avif
“Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner,” by Thomas Nast, Harper’s Weekly, 1869. (Source: Princeton University)

This week the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. It’s no accident that the executive order in January 2025 and his March executive order calling for the “Restoring of Truth and Sanity in American History” were issued at roughly the same time.

On the surface, one appears to be an immigration dispute, the other a culture war skirmish over school curricula and the work of public historians. But examined together, these campaigns reveal a coherent—if unspoken—ideological project, namely the dismantling of Reconstruction’s legacy, including both its legal architecture and its historical memory.

The administration’s stated rationale for ending birthright citizenship has been immigration enforcement. But the legal structure being attacked is not an immigration statute. It is the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War.

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What is being targeted is not mere ideology in the abstract. What is being targeted is the knowledge that makes the Fourteenth Amendment legible. To understand why birthright citizenship exists, one must understand Dred Scott. To understand why the Civil Rights Act was necessary, one must understand the Black Codes and the systematic terror of Reconstruction’s collapse. To understand why the Voting Rights Act was necessary, one must understand the literacy tests, the poll taxes, the organized violence of disenfranchisement. ... Strip away this history, and the remedial architecture of American constitutional law appears not as hard-won justice but as preferential grievance. This is precisely the “divisive” material the administration claims it to be. ... This is not coincidence.

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