Pilar was two weeks into her pregnancy when she learned that her baby might not become an American citizen.
That’s because the first day President Donald Trump took office, he signed an executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants—as well as for anyone residing in the United States legally but temporarily, which could include refugees, work visa holders, foreign religious workers, and those with a pending green card or asylum request.
All of a sudden, Pilar’s answer to prayer, a pregnancy after three years of trying, became a source of anxiety. She began to wonder if she was done having children.
“She was like our little miracle baby,” said Pilar, whose full name Christianity Today is withholding. “But when that executive order came down, it was the first time that I was genuinely scared and upset.”
Pilar is among millions of Americans awaiting a Supreme Court decision this summer on the legality of Trump’s order, which was put on hold by lower courts. Birthright citizenship is guaranteed through the 14th Amendment and has been upheld through more than a century of legal challenges.
The president’s effort to end the practice, if successful, would rewrite the future for generations of immigrants to the United States. It also ranks among the least popular components of his hard-line immigration approach. Support for birthright citizenship has grown over the last two decades, and nearly two-thirds of Americans oppose eliminating it.
Pilar is not a citizen but describes herself as once a Trump supporter. She said she would have voted for him had she been able to, because she aligns with conservative values. But the aggressive immigration tactics of the second Trump administration have unsettled her.
“I didn’t think that this time around he was actually going to fulfill what he said he was going to do in a campaign,” she told CT.
Pilar, who works as a paralegal in Florida, knows what it means to be in the shadows. As a child, she lived in constant legal uncertainty. Her mother fled violence in Colombia, bringing Pilar and her sister to America over two decades ago.
“She was a woman of faith,” Pilar recalls. She wanted to do things by the book.
Her mother filed for asylum and updated immigration authorities on their address. But the family never received a notice to appear in court for an asylum hearing, so they never went. That absence earned them a deportation order, the standard consequence for failing to keep an immigration court appointment.
Pilar recalls her mother fervently praying that “God would make us invisible in the eyes of the police” as she drove them to elementary school.
Eventually, her mother hired an attorney and got the family’s deportation order reversed. Then in 2012, Pilar and her sister received Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, status—protecting the girls from removal.
Today, Pilar and her husband, who serve together in youth ministry at their charismatic church, have a four-year-old son. But they always wanted a bigger family. Late last year, they got the happy news that she was expecting again.
Weeks later, they saw the news that their coming baby might not become a US citizen.
Trump’s executive order was set to take effect February 2025, but federal judges blocked its implementation. The administration appealed to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to prevent lower courts from issuing such nationwide injunctions. Last May, the court put limits on injunctions but did not address the merits of the executive order.
Then, in July 2025, a district judge approved a class-action challenge to the order, again halting its implementation. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of the executive order in that case, Trump v. Barbara.
“Immigration has always been something that, you know, we pray, we trust God, and somehow we’re protected,” Pilar said. But she hopes her daughter, and future children, won’t have to know that same uncertainty.
“As a mom, it’s the worst. Because when things happen to you, you don’t feel them as much, but when things happen to your kids,” she said, “that kind of broke me that day.”
As a practice, birthright citizenship hearkens to America’s founding. After independence, the framers adopted a view of citizenship called jus soli, or “right of the soil,” that tied citizenship to a person’s place of birth. It was unusual: Other countries granted citizenship based on bloodline or parentage.
But jus soli did not apply universally. In the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision in 1857, for instance, Chief Justice Roger Taney opined that Black people—enslaved or free—could never become Americans.
Americans repudiated Dred Scott after the Civil War by ratifying the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause in 1868, which grants that “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.”
Controversies around citizenship have flared ever since. One key example is an 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the federal government defended its decision to deny a US-born man reentry after a short trip to China.
A majority of the court ruled that the man, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was an American citizen. The Supreme Court held that the “Fourteenth Amendment affirms the ancient and fundamental rule of citizenship by birth within the territory, in the allegiance and under the protection of the country, including all children here born of resident aliens.”
In Trump v. Barbara, the administration contends that Wong Kim Ark and other court cases have misinterpreted the 14th Amendment.
During oral arguments in April, Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices that 19th-century Americans who ratified the amendment did not believe that citizenship extended to children of temporary visitors. He also focused on the words reside, in the amendment, and domicile, which appears in the Wong Kim Ark decision—arguing that both terms suggest citizenship is only for permanent residents, not migrants or visitors who come for so-called “birth tourism.”
Some key justices appeared skeptical. Chief Justice John Roberts called some of Sauer’s arguments “very quirky.” He asked Sauer how common birth tourism really is, to which Sauer responded, “No one knows for sure.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked whether Trump or a future president could attempt to make the executive order retroactive if it were found constitutional. Sauer left the possibility open.
Other justices, including Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas, appeared more receptive to the government’s case.
Representing the class of challengers, ACLU national legal director Cecillia Wang described birthright citizenship as a “fixed bright-line” rule.
“If you credit the government’s theory,” she said, “the citizenship of millions of Americans past, present, and future could be called into question.”
Jeremy McKinney, founder of McKinney Immigration Law in Greensboro, North Carolina, doesn’t think a majority of the justices will buy the government’s argument.
“There’s nothing in the Constitution about blood, your kinship, being a part of this,” he said. “You can’t just wipe away what the other two branches, Congress and the judicial branch, have been saying for well over a century,” he said.
“At the end of the day, I think this executive order loses.”
But despite his optimistic outlook, McKinney has seen the strain on his clients: “The anxiety level has never been this high.”
Conchita Cruz with the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project has also seen high levels of concern among immigrant families at the prospect that a newborn child, even one born to lawfully present parents, could be flagged for deportation.
“Members are asking us, ‘Will ICE be waiting outside of the hospital?’” she said, referring to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “It really casts a shadow over what should be a very happy time for a family, of bringing a new child into the world.”
Critics have said that whether or not people feel birthright citizenship should be the law of the land, Trump’s executive order would create a host of complications that could affect even babies born to US citizens. If a birth certificate were no longer enough to prove someone is a US citizen, what additional proof would parents need to provide? And what about children abandoned after birth with no record of their family history?
An amicus brief submitted by a coalition of 57 faith-based organizations, representing a variety of faiths, called the executive order contrary to America’s history of religious freedom.
“Far from welcoming strangers, including those escaping religious persecution, the Executive Order places their children at risk by denying them the benefits of citizenship that should be guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment,” the brief reads.
Jennie Murray, president of the National Immigration Forum, said she’s seen churches and Christian groups increase practical outreach efforts to support immigrants in their congregations and communities, from organizing prayer to putting together baby showers for undocumented women whose husbands are in immigration detention.
“I’ve seen a lot of congregations start to figure out if they can actually stand in the gap,” she said.
For the time being, babies are still receiving birth certificates and passports.
Pilar, though, wonders if the culture of her circle of Hispanic Christians would change if birthright citizenship disappeared overnight. As a parent, she doesn’t want her children to grow up with the stress and instability of being undocumented. She doubts she’s alone in that feeling.
“As a community—I would say this about Christians in general—we’re all pro family. …My best friend has five kids. My sister has four. My other best friend has three,” she said. “But I think that would change.”
“The reality is, we would probably stay put with our two kids,” she said.
She’s hoping the Supreme Court’s order doesn’t “go retroactive to the birth of my daughter, because that would be really terrible.”
On the morning of oral arguments, Pilar and her husband led a 6 a.m. prayer meeting with members of their church community. Despite the early hour, around 60 people called in.
“We really prayed that God would give wisdom and compassion to the justices,” she said, noting the decision will affect the littlest of children most. “I believe in my heart what the Bible says, you know, that whatever you do for the least of these, you have done for me.”
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the case in June or early July.
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