Carrie Johnson

Here's what she had to say.

So those are all very basic functions, and it would upset a whole bunch of systems that have been in place for decades and decades and decades.

Yeah.

In the worst case scenario, those babies would be considered stateless.

They would have no clear citizenship.

And, you know, that's that's a very significant thing.

This court has been wanting to achieve a lot in a relatively short period of time.

Remember, there's a six to three conservative supermajority.

President Trump has already named three justices of the nine, and they've been quite welcomed.

and able to overturn some kind of fundamental precedents in this country already.

It wasn't that long ago that we had the Dobbs case, which threw out Roe v. Wade.

And we're waiting on the edges of our chairs right now for what this court intends to do with the Voting Rights Act.

So the idea that they would even take a question with respect to birthright citizenship says a lot about how conservative this court is politically and how open they are to rethinking what was previously considered to be settled law for generations or over a century.

Well, you know, one of the things that advocates I've been talking to have signaled is that if the Supreme Court sides with the Trump administration and upends the kind of common understanding of the 14th Amendment we've had really since the post-Civil War era—

that means that a number of other things we thought were settled could be really unsettled.

Once you start to open up the 14th Amendment, which helped form the basis of many of our major civil rights laws in the last century or so, and many other understandings in some of our fundamental rights, it's hard to say

where things end.

And of course, this Trump executive order from last year was just talking about prospectively, that's new babies born in the U.S.

since he signed that order.

But these advocates worry that there's nothing that would then prevent the Trump administration from going back and trying to revoke citizenship from other people.