Thomas Wolf for the Brennan Center:

President Trump claimed to end birthright citizenship on the first day of his second term. Trump’s executive order is unconstitutional, in direct conflict with the plain language of the 14th Amendment and over a century’s worth of Supreme Court case law. It will be litigated immediately and its prospects of surviving those court fights are slim, even before a Supreme Court stacked with conservative justices and Trump appointees.

Before getting into the merits of the constitutional case against Trump’s executive order, it’s worth pausing to stress the brazenness of what he has done. Every new president swears to uphold the Constitution. Only minutes after taking that oath, President Trump violated it — flagrantly.

Turning to the history and text of the 14th Amendment: Before that amendment was ratified, America had a racialized class system in which enslaved people were denied the most basic rights granted by our founding documents. The Supreme Court blessed this system with its infamous Dred Scott decision, which ruled that enslaved people and their children could never be citizens. The Civil War was waged to put an end to this state of affairs. And, as a condition of their readmission to the Union, former slaveholding states were required to accept the principles reflected in the 14th Amendment. Among them, a plain statement of who is a citizen: “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.” In other words, if you’re born here, you’re one of us. It doesn’t matter who your parents were, whether they were free or enslaved, American citizens or not: You’re one of us. There is no other way to understand those words….