Longtime FASPE (Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics) faculty member Eric Muller, represented by FASPE alumna Rachel Grossman, submitted an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court this week in Trump v. Barbara, the case adjudicating whether the Trump administration can roll back or limit birthright citizenship.

Muller, a law professor at the University of North Carolina and leading expert on the internment of people of Japanese descent in the United States during World War II, argues in the brief that the history of babies born in internment camps provides crucial evidence that the government cannot limit birthright citizenship in the way the current administration seeks to. Grossman, an attorney at HWG LLC and a 2022 FASPE Law fellow, represented Muller for the brief, along with fellow HWG attorneys John Nakahata and Sean Lev.

An amicus or “friend of the court” brief is a brief submitted by people or organizations that are not parties to a case, but who are experts in a relevant matter or bring unique knowledge, experience, or perspectives that could help the Court appropriately decide the case. The 14th Amendment provides that children born in the United States are United States citizens, but the Trump administration argues in Trump v. Barbara that this citizenship is contingent on a child’s parents’ “primary allegiance” being to the United States. 

In the brief, Muller discusses children born at two World War II detention centers in the United States whose parents were either Japanese citizens deemed enemy aliens by the United States, Japanese Americans who specifically renounced their United States citizenship, or people of Japanese descent involuntarily taken to the United States from Peru, and explains that all of these children were deemed United States citizens. Muller argues that if the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship was limited by the parents’ primary allegiance, surely that limitation would have manifested itself in the context of World War II internment, when concern about possible disloyalty to the United States was at its highest.

“The fact that the United States recognized the birthright citizenship of children of parents deemed disloyal to the United States—especially during the crisis of allegiances ushered in by World War II—undermines the notion that so-called “primary allegiance” … is a precondition of birthright citizenship under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment or the Nationality Act of 1940,” the brief argues. “The history confirms that today, with very limited exceptions, the law guarantees U.S. citizenship to all children born on U.S. soil.”

In 2021, when COVID restrictions prevented travel to Europe, FASPE instead hosted its fellowship program at the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming, one of several sites of Japanese American confinement during World War II. Drawing on Muller’s expertise and FASPE’s site-based approach to learning, fellows examined the ethical failures of professionals whose choices resulted in the forced relocation and unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans from 1942–1946.

The full brief can be found here. The Supreme Court will be hearing oral arguments in the case April 1 and deciding the case before the end of the current term, likely in June.