Stephen Miller says Supreme Court birthright ruling 'outrageous', pushes 'blood' citizenship basis

Miller’s ‘blood, not soil’ citizenship argument draws scrutiny

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff who has been described as the principal architect of the administration’s immigration policy, said the Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling that struck down Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship was “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court,” according to a Guardian opinion column by Sidney Blumenthal published Sunday.

Miller posted the statement on X after the 5-4 decision, which upheld the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause guaranteeing citizenship to most children born in the United States. “American citizenship is not the birthright of the world,” Miller wrote. “It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration.”

The column, which is an opinion piece, reported that Miller’s response reflects a broader ideology that seeks to base citizenship on genetic inheritance rather than birth on U.S. soil. Blumenthal compared Miller’s position to the reasoning in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, writing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should be the death knell for claims that seek to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, had itself referenced Dred Scott as an “odious” precedent that made “blood, not soil” the rule. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence added that the “Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim–one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright.”

MSI previously reported that Miller called the ruling “outrageous” and that Trump has since asked the Supreme Court to rehear the case. The court has rarely granted such requests.

In a Fox News interview cited by the Guardian column, Miller said: “We have people from all over the world from third world nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby, and then that baby is automatically a citizen? The baby can sit on a jury when they turn 18?”

The Guardian column reported that Miller has frequently stated that “if you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” and that he has been the driving force behind the administration’s aggressive deportation policies, restrictive immigration measures, and voter suppression efforts based on the disproven assertion of mass illegal voting.

The column also noted that Miller helped draft Trump’s so-called “Save Act,” which would require proof of U.S. citizenship to vote — a measure critics have described as a new poll tax. Miller tweeted on June 24: “Change the voters, change the country.”

The Guardian column pointed to what it described as an irony in Miller’s position: that Trump’s own family history includes immigrant ancestors who would have been affected by the policies Miller advocates. The column noted that Trump’s grandmother, Elizabeth Christ Trump, was an immigrant from Germany.