Catholic Bishops File Supreme Court Brief Calling Trump's Birthright Citizenship Order "Immoral"

The nation’s Catholic bishops are urging the nation’s highest court to strike down Executive Order 14,160 on constitutional and moral grounds.

WASHINGTON — The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court this week in Trump v. Barbara et al., No. 25-365, urging the justices to strike down President Donald Trump’s Executive Order stripping birthright citizenship from children born in the United States to undocumented or temporarily-present mothers whose fathers are not citizens or permanent residents.

The brief, filed on behalf of the USCCB and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc. — which collectively serve nearly 500,000 immigrants annually through more than 415 legal programs across 49 states — pulls no punches. It calls the executive order flatly “immoral” and warns that if left standing, it could render millions of American-born children stateless by 2045.

“Depriving an innocent child of his citizenship based upon his parents’ immigration status would be an especially outrageous punishment,” the brief states, citing Trop v. Dulles (1958), in which the Supreme Court itself rejected statelessness as too cruel a punishment even for convicted criminals.

A Moral and Legal Broadside

The bishops ground their argument in three pillars: Western legal tradition, the Fourteenth Amendment, and Catholic social teaching.

On the law, the brief traces birthright citizenship — jus soli, or citizenship by place of birth — from Roman law through a landmark 1608 English court ruling, Calvin’s Case, through the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which explicitly held that American-born children of immigrants are U.S. citizens. The Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, the bishops argue, was specifically enacted to repudiate the logic of Dred Scott v. Sandford — the 1857 ruling that denied Black Americans citizenship based on ancestry.

“This history demonstrates that birthright citizenship is neither an innovation nor an aberration,” the brief states, “but a deeply rooted principle of the Western legal tradition — one that the United States consciously embraced and constitutionalized in the wake of grave moral and legal failure.”

The moral argument is equally pointed. The brief invokes Pope Leo XIV, who has spoken out repeatedly about the dignity of immigrants and children, and draws on papal encyclicals dating back to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum. The brief argues that the executive order violates the Catholic principle of subsidiarity — the idea that government must protect, not undermine, families and communities at their most basic level.

The Statelessness Warning

Perhaps the most urgent section of the brief addresses statelessness — the condition of having no recognized nationality in any country. Citing a May 2025 Migration Policy Institute study, the bishops warn that the executive order would increase the unauthorized population in the United States by as many as 2.7 million people by 2045, while exposing many to statelessness.

Stateless individuals, the brief notes, are frequently denied birth certificates, barred from schools, blocked from employment and healthcare, and made targets for human trafficking and labor exploitation. Families facing removal could find themselves with nowhere to go — no country willing to receive them as a unit.

“Children do nothing wrong by being born in the United States,” the brief states. “Yet, this Executive Order renders them stateless.”

The Church Itself Is Feeling the Pressure

The bishops also disclosed the tangible effects already being felt in Catholic parishes and schools. Five bishops have taken the extraordinary step of formally dispensing Catholics from their Sunday Mass obligation if they fear that traveling to worship puts them at risk of immigration enforcement. The USCCB’s own February 2026 Religious Liberty report documents parishioners pulling their children from Catholic schools and avoiding Church-run social services out of fear.

“The Church’s mission to serve all members of our community and proclaim God’s word is undermined by the Executive Order,” the brief states, “which discourages people from participating in Church life and seeking spiritual guidance.”

The Bigger Picture

The brief arrives as Trump v. Barbara hurtles toward the Supreme Court on an expedited schedule — certiorari was granted before judgment even issued from the First Circuit. The administration has argued that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” clause excludes children of immigrants without legal status.

The bishops flatly reject that interpretation. Membership in the political order, they argue, “does not depend on race or national origin — or that of one’s parent — but rather only on being a human person born in the jurisdiction of the United States.”

The USCCB is represented by WilmerHale attorneys Matthew T. Martens, Aaron Pinkett, Robert Kingsley Smith, and Mary Clare Rigali.