The United States Supreme Court heard oral arguments today in Trump v. Barbara, the case that will determine whether a president can end birthright citizenship by executive order. Trump showed up in person to watch, the first sitting president ever to attend oral arguments.
The order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office in January 2025, would deny automatic citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil if neither parent is a citizen or lawful permanent resident. Every lower court to consider the order has blocked it. A final ruling is expected by early summer.
Most Texans support ending birthright citizenship, and they have for years. They get it. Birthright citizenship creates an incentive for illegal border crossings, and those crossings happen on Texas soil, in Texas communities, with consequences that Texas families pay for. People in Washington and Manhattan can afford to treat this as a policy debate. Texans living along the Rio Grande cannot.
But this case should bother every Texan who supports Trump’s position. Not because he might lose. Because the process itself is the indictment.
A Decade of Asking. Eighteen Months of Litigation. Still Waiting.
Consider what it took just to get this question before the Supreme Court.
Texans and conservatives nationwide have pushed to end birthright citizenship for years. Congress wouldn’t touch it. Administration after administration promised border security and delivered half-measures or nothing. It took one president, willing to use executive power in ways no predecessor would, to force the issue.
And then every single lower court blocked the order. The litigation has dragged through the federal system for over a year. The ACLU and a coalition of left-wing legal organizations have thrown everything they have at it. And now, after all of that, the fate of birthright citizenship sits with nine unelected justices, several of whom appeared openly skeptical of the administration’s arguments today.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment was always understood to limit citizenship to children of those lawfully domiciled in the United States. Chief Justice Roberts called his reasoning “very quirky.” Justice Barrett questioned why the framers of the Amendment never discussed this supposedly narrow intent. Justice Gorsuch pointed out that the historical record barely mentions “domicile” at all. Even Justice Thomas, who seemed sympathetic, pressed the point that the 14th Amendment was written to settle the citizenship of freed slaves, not to address immigration.
ACLU attorney Cecillia Wang countered with the straightforward reading: the 14th Amendment means what it says. Born on U.S. soil and subject to its laws, you are a citizen.
The uncomfortable truth: even with a sympathetic president, a sympathetic solicitor general, and a 6-3 conservative Court, there is a real chance this effort fails. And even if it succeeds, the next administration can reverse it with a pen stroke, launching another cycle of litigation that grinds on for years.
That is what “working within the system” looks like.
The System Is the Problem
Texans have wanted this for years. A president finally acted. And the result, eighteen months later, is a coin flip in a courtroom 1,500 miles from the Texas border.
The justices deciding this case have never waited in an emergency room in the Rio Grande Valley. They have never watched their property taxes climb to fund services for a population the federal government invited in and refused to manage. They have never driven past the aftermath of a human smuggling operation on a rural Texas highway.
The system does not respond to Texans. It forces them to wait, to hope, and to accept whatever Washington hands down on Washington’s timeline.
The deeper issue is this: who qualifies for citizenship in your political community is a question that goes to the core of sovereignty. It should be answered by the people who live with the consequences, through institutions they control. Instead, 30 million Texans are spectators. The President acts. The courts respond. Texans get whatever comes out the other end.
The 14th Amendment: Built on a Cracked Foundation
The Amendment at the center of this fight has its own complicated history, and it matters.
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to overturn the Supreme Court’s disgraceful Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could never be citizens. The moral case for the Amendment was beyond dispute.
But the 14th Amendment was also ratified under coercion. The former Confederate states, Texas among them, were required to ratify it as a condition of readmission to the Union. Their legislatures operated under Reconstruction governments installed by military authority. They could not say no.
That coercive origin matters because the 14th Amendment has since become the primary mechanism by which the federal government exercises authority over the states on nearly everything: education, criminal justice, voting rights, and now the definition of citizenship itself. The entire architecture of federal supremacy rests on a foundation that was never laid by mutual consent.
The birthright citizenship fight is the latest example of what happens when 330 million people, spread across vastly different regions with different needs and values, try to settle basic questions of political identity through a single centralized process. The process satisfies almost nobody, and the people most affected have the least say.
Texas Has Done This Before
When Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836, one of the first acts of the new Republic was to define who was a Texan. The Constitution of the Republic extended citizenship to all persons residing in Texas on the day of the Declaration of Independence, regardless of national origin, and to all who would afterward migrate to the Republic and swear allegiance.
Texans decided that. Not a distant capital. Not a president acting alone. Not judges Texans never selected. And it could not be undone by the next election cycle.
An independent Texas could do it again. Set its own immigration policy. Define its own citizenship requirements. Secure its own border. Adjust those policies as conditions change, through legislation, accountable to Texans.
No executive orders. No years of litigation. No waiting on nine people in robes to decide your future.
The Real Lesson of Trump v. Barbara
If the Court sides with Trump, it will be a win, but a fragile one. The next president can undo it. The next round of lawsuits can challenge it. If the Court sides against him, Texans will be told, again, that the system has spoken: the Constitution (ratified under duress) has been interpreted (by judges they didn’t choose), and they should accept it.
Win or lose, the core problem does not change.
Texas does not control its own border. Texas does not set its own immigration policy. Texas does not define who is a Texan. Those decisions are made by people and institutions in Washington over which Texans have almost no influence.
There is one way to fix that.
An independent Texas would not need a friendly president. It would not need to survive eighteen months of litigation. It would not need to hope that nine justices see it their way.
An independent Texas would govern itself.
That is what TEXIT is about. Not one immigration policy. Not one court case. The principle that the people of Texas are sovereign and that the power to define their own political community belongs to them.
The justices will issue their ruling this summer. Whatever they decide, 30 million Texans will have had no say in the outcome.
