First Americans

“The United States’ connection with the children of illegal aliens and temporary visitors is weaker than its connection with members of Indian tribes,” DOJ argued in a filing. “If the latter link is insufficient for birthright citizenship, the former certainly is,” the Trump administration argued.”

The DOJ cited an 1884 U.S. Supreme Court case, Elk v. Wilkins, in which the high court decided that “because members of Indian tribes owe ‘immediate allegiance’ to their tribes, they are not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are not constitutionally entitled to Citizenship.”

But the DOJ ignored congressional action, the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, that explicitly gave Indigenous people U.S. birthright citizenship and effectively ended the rejection of citizenship that the Supreme Court had upheld four decades earlier.