The Sharia-Free Texas Caucus, a Texas House caucus founded by Texas First Pledge signer State Rep. Brent Money of Greenville, issued a statement Tuesday condemning the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling upholding birthright citizenship, calling it a catastrophic decision that threatens both Texas and federal sovereignty and pledging to pursue state legislation in response.
The statement came hours after the Court ruled 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara that children born on U.S. soil are entitled to automatic citizenship regardless of their parents’ immigration status, striking down the executive order President Trump signed on his first day back in office to end the practice. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, grounding the ruling in the Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.
The caucus’s statement argued the ruling defies the original intent of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, quoting Senator Jacob Howard’s 1866 floor remarks that the clause was never meant to cover the children of foreigners or aliens with no allegiance to the country. Framing the decision as one that extends citizenship to the children of “aliens, illegal entrants, and birth tourists,” the statement argued birthright citizenship was intended only for those fully subject to U.S. jurisdiction, not those who “owe allegiance elsewhere,” and warned the ruling would accelerate what it called “hostile demographic change” while rewarding unlawful presence with what it termed the ultimate prize of citizenship.
The statement rested its call to action on Texas’s own constitutional standing rather than on Congress. It invoked Texas’s 1845 admission to the Union “on equal footing,” argued the state has never surrendered her core sovereign authorities, and cited Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist No. 26, which described state legislatures as vigilant and jealous guardians of the people’s rights against federal encroachment, ready to serve as both the voice and, if necessary, the arm of the people’s discontent. Casting itself as that voice and arm, the caucus said it would use the Tenth Amendment and Texas’s historic police powers, those exercised during the Republic era and in her early decades of statehood, to advance legislation reasserting Texas’s authority to define and enforce citizenship and lawful presence within her own borders.
The caucus’s underlying argument, that Texas retains sovereign authority the federal government has never lawfully extinguished, is one TNM has made for two decades. It is also one of the things this ruling illustrates the limits of. A state legislature can pass a bill asserting authority over citizenship within its borders. It cannot make that bill survive a Fourteenth Amendment challenge, because the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court on Tuesday, does not currently give it that power. Only a constitutional amendment, requiring two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states, or a change in Texas’s constitutional relationship to Washington altogether, could.
That is the case TNM continues to build. TEXIT is how Texas gains the authority to decide for herself who belongs to her.
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