The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, hearing arguments over President Donald Trump’s bid to redefine birthright citizenship, pressed a U.S. Department of Justice attorney Wednesday to explain how the 14th Amendment could be parsed to exclude U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and certain visa-holding parents.
DOJ attorney Eric Dean McArthur argued that while the constitutional amendment provides U.S. citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” its crafters never intended the language to apply without exceptions.