The “Birth” in Birthright
  April 2, 2026 Greetings Meteor readers, Big news! UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham has been nominated for two Webby awards! Voting is now open, and you can support us by clicking here and here, and firmly instructing your loved ones to do the same The polls are open until the 16th, so send this to your friends, your family, a neighbor, anyone with an email address. And if this celebration of UNDISTRACTED is making you miss the show, then you’re in luck: Season Four is on the way!  In today’s newsletter, we focus on the people who would be targeted the most if birthright citizenship evaporated: mothers and their babies. Plus, a quick trip to the moon. Vote for UNDISTRACTED, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONStateless: Yesterday, the Supreme Court—and for a brief moment, Donald Trump—heard oral arguments for Trump v. Barbara, the case to determine whether or not the president’s 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional or enforceable. As legal experts have pointed out, the government’s argument is entirely based on openly racist notions of who gets to be an American. What Wednesday’s arguments also made abundantly clear is that Trump’s administration has been so hyper-focused on removing immigrants via all available avenues it hasn’t stopped to consider the logistics of this order, especially when it comes to the “birth” part of birthright citizenship. “Are you suggesting that when a baby is born, people have to…present documents?” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked yesterday. “Is this happening in the delivery room?…Are we bringing in pregnant women for depositions?” Even most of the conservative justices seemed skeptical, including Amy Coney Barrett: “I can imagine it being messy on some applications…How would it work? How would you adjudicate these cases?” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the man arguing on behalf of the administration, didn’t have clear answers. But he insisted that non-citizens who have children in the U.S. were “jumping[ing] in front of those who follow the rules,” as if having a child here would give those parents protection from deportation or detention. (It doesn’t.) The government may have shrugged at these questions, but we (and legal experts) are pretty sure of one thing: A ban on birthright citizenship would put enormous stress on the lives of expectant and new parents. In fact, this case only exists because of immigrant mothers who worried so much about the implications of the executive order that they sued the U.S. government. Over the last year, DHS has deported roughly 300 pregnant or postpartum women. Those who had U.S.-born children—like Heidy Sanchez, Cecil Elvir-Quinonez, and Nayra Guzman—were separated from those children by law enforcement. Under the 14th Amendment, these children are full citizens. But the government is proposing that instead of being granted citizenship, those children should provide evidence that at least one of their parents is a citizen in order to be considered for citizenship themselves. If they cannot do that, they will become, in legal terms, “stateless,” belonging to no nation and a citizen to nowhere. So where should those children go? Should we send them to jail? Or deport them? But to where, if they were born in the U.S? And how long would DHS wait after a woman gives birth to pursue a case against her—would agents show up in the recovery room at the hospital? At a woman’s six-week appointment after delivering? If a child is stateless and not subject to the “gift of American citizenship,” as Sauer put it, then are they also not protected by laws like this one, which confirms that abandoned children of unknown parentage are citizens? The end of birthright citizenship would, in the words of Samuel Breidbart and Maryjane Johnson of the Brennan Center for Justice, “create a new subclass of people lacking the full rights and protections long enjoyed by citizens.” Denied social security numbers, they would be without standard access to health care and education, and could “end up deported to foreign countries where they have never lived and where their welfare would be endangered.” All of this would create a culture of fear for everyone, immigrant or otherwise. “Under the new legal regime the order would create, everyone would be vulnerable to having their citizenship questioned,” notes Breidbart and Johnson. Even legal citizens would have to make sure they take their paperwork with them on the way to giving birth—or, frankly, to anywhere else. Think about that for a moment. If you were stopped right now on your way to the grocery store, how would you prove your citizenship? How would you prove your parents’ citizenship? Now imagine being asked those questions a woman in labor…or a five-year-old in the back of an ICE vehicle. AND:
 DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
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