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Moments after the Supreme Court reaffirmed its expansive understanding of birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara this June, making clear that virtually all of those born in the United States are U.S. citizens based on the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, the Heritage Foundation’s Roger Severino tweeted “Pres. Trump should immediately amend his EO to apply to U.S. Territories which are not auto-bound by the 14th Amendment.” Hours later, Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Vice President JD Vance about the tweet on her primetime program. He agreed that action limiting birthright citizenship in U.S. territories would be “a great idea,” chuckling, “we’re certainly looking at that.”
Two weeks later, a member of the Congressional Freedom Caucus introduced the , with far-reaching language that, if passed, could deny citizenship to anyone born in a U.S. territory from Jan. 1, 2027, forward. Shortly after, President Donald Trump took action, issuing an Executive Order in August that, among other things, purports to limit birthright citizenship in U.S. territories “where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute.” In the wake of this executive order, a new report by Americans Advancing Freedom and the Edwin Meese III Institute made the case that Congress “can and should … limit U.S. citizenship” for people “born in the territories.”
Each of these attempts to subvert constitutional limits are specifically grounded in a series of 125-year-old Supreme Court decisions known as the Insular Cases, which addressed whether and how the Constitution applied in Puerto Rico, Guam, and other newly acquired U.S. territories following the 1898 Spanish American War. According to the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act, the Insular Cases “stand[] for the proposition” that “Congress has the inherent authority to change statutes relating to citizenship of persons born in the territories.” This is possible because under the Insular Cases, the AAF report claims, “the Constitution does not fully apply” in so-called “unincorporated territories.”
However, what legal force the Insular Cases have today, if any, continues to be debated (not least in part because they were grounded on expressly racist sentiments). On the one hand, the Supreme Court has characterized the Insular Cases “doctrine of territorial incorporation” as broadly supporting the idea that “the Constitution applies in full in incorporated Territories surely destined for statehood but only in part in unincorporated Territories.” But in the same breath it made clear that “[t]he Constitution grants Congress and the President the power to acquire, dispose of, and govern territory, not the power to decide when and where its terms apply.”
And while the Supreme Court in Barbara expressly rejected attempts by the Trump administration to reinterpret the citizenship clause to exclude disfavored immigrant groups, the Supreme Court has simply dodged answering the question of citizenship in U.S. territories at all – first in one of the Insular Cases in 1904 and twice more over the last decade.
At the same time, these cases have faced much criticism within the court itself, which has increasingly limited the Insular Cases to their specific historical context and narrow legal conclusions, reaffirming recently that these cases “should not be further extended.” Several justices have gone even further. In Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s concurrence in Barbara, for example, she specifically critiqued the Insular Cases as an example of when the Supreme Court has “denied Americans” the “promise” of “securing equal citizenship.” Similarly, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor have labeled the Insular Cases a “misguided framework” and called for them to be overruled. Sotomayor wrote that the Insular Cases were “premised on beliefs both odious and wrong.” Gorsuch, for his part, has declared in unequivocal terms that the Insular Cases “deserve no place in our law” because they “have no foundation in the Constitution and rest instead on racial stereotypes.”
Despite the court’s increasing skepticism of the Insular Cases, their unresolved status has left the door open for the political branches to define for themselves who in so-called “unincorporated” territories are U.S. citizens. The federal government – Republican and Democratic administrations alike – continue to label people born in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands as “statutory” rather than “Fourteenth Amendment” U.S. citizens. And it denies even statutory recognition of citizenship to people born to non-citizen parents in American Samoa, labeling them instead with the anomalous status of “non-citizen” U.S. nationals – owing “permanent allegiance” to the United States, but lacking the protections or rights of citizenship. For the 3.6 million people living in U.S. territories, it remains a daily reality that constitutional limits on federal power remain unclear, with their status as U.S. citizens under threat from unilateral federal action.
Federal actions in U.S. territories lack democratic accountability
Current efforts to limit citizenship in U.S. territories are just the latest example of the federal government claiming near unlimited powers and testing controversial policy ideas on people who lack the basic democratic tools to defend themselves.
In Puerto Rico, an undemocratic, federally appointed financial oversight board has for the last decade exercised not just near-unlimited power over the archipelago’s budget and finances, but even the power to annul local legislation. Basic social safety net programs like supplemental security income for low-income seniors and disabled people are provided to residents of the Northern Mariana Islands, but not in Guam, which lies less than 60 miles away. Residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands enjoy full benefits under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), but not residents of Puerto Rico just 22 miles away. Conversely, Puerto Rico remains subject to the cost-raising shipping limitations of the Jones Act, but not the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Pacific territories and the Indigenous communities that call them home are also on the front lines – denied any meaningful say – of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to secure rare earth minerals through controversial and untested deep sea mining. And next month the Supreme Court will consider a case questioning whether the U.S. Air Force can continue open-air detonation of hazardous military ordinance over Guam’s sole source aquifer without completing the environmental impact statement and community engagement generally required under federal law.
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Usually when the federal government does something people don’t like, they are told to call their senator or representative or to “throw the bums out” at the next election. But people in U.S. territories lack any voting representation in Congress. They cannot vote for president. And for 125 years they have been denied their right to self-determination.
Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously established the idea of states as “laboratories of democracy,” describing how “a single courageous State may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” What we have today in U.S. territories is the converse – laboratories of (un)democracy, or what Gorsuch properly termed “American colonialism.” The people of U.S. territories are subject to novel social and economic experiments without their say or consent. None of this can be squared with the principles of “consent of the governed” and all “created equal” on which the United States was founded 250 years ago.
The results of these ongoing policy “experiments” are grim – poverty rates ranging from 2-5 times the national average, an 11.6% loss of population from 2010-2020, and health disparities greater than any state.
The Insular Cases are an open invitation for authoritarians
Finally, these latest developments targeting the constitutional rights of people in U.S. territories are problematic for reasons that should concern everyone.
Until the Barbara decision, there was a growing cross-ideological consensus that it was time for “a long overdue reckoning,” as Gorsuch put it, on the Insular Cases and their doctrine of extra-constitutional powers. Prominent originalist scholars like professor Michael Ramsey have made a compelling case that the Insular Cases are “contrary to the Constitution’s original meaning.” Small government conservatives like professor Gary Lawson, co-founder of the Federalist Society, wrote a whole book called “The Constitution of Empire” about how “there is nothing in the Constitution that even intimates that express constitutional limitations on national power apply differently to different territories.”
The recent embrace of the Insular Cases by the Heritage Foundation, AAF, and the Edwin Meese III Institute, as noted earlier, represents a troubling shift in this consensus. It also fits within a broader context of Trump expressing his admiration of McKinley during his second Inaugural Address, declaring “[t]he United States will once again consider itself a growing nation — one that … expands our territory … and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons.” Just last week, Trump posted a picture on social media showing the Strait of Hormuz as a “new” U.S. territory, along with flags of other existing U.S. territories (as well as Washington, D.C., and two Pacific nations that are not U.S. territories). And then there is the president’s ongoing obsession with Greenland and other parts of the world he’d like the United States to “own.”
The legacy of the Insular Cases, and with it the idea that the United States can obtain sovereignty over foreign peoples and lands without the president or Congress having to respect constitutional rights or limits on constitutional power – much less provide for democratic rights – is thus more dangerous today than ever before. It is not hard to see the slippery slope for a doctrine holding that the Constitution does not “fully apply” with regard to U.S. citizens living on U.S. soil. If the political branches can carve out exceptions to the Constitution in one context, such as the citizenship clause in the territories, it opens the door to carving them out in other contexts. Yet, while the Supreme Court has narrowed the Insular Cases, it has avoided opportunity after opportunity to overrule them altogether, leaving them as precedent to be potentially weaponized by any president or Congress.
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One of the strengths of the U.S. federal system is that it allows for democratic experimentation at the state and local levels. But that only works under a constitutional framework that ensures political accountability and the rule of law for everyone. U.S. territories offer a cautionary tale of what goes wrong when our constitutional framework is set aside and democracy shifts towards authoritarian rule. It is time for anyone serious about democracy, limited government, or self-determination to recognize that the colonial framework established by the Insular Cases is real, wrong, and needs to end now.
Disclosure: The author served as counsel of record in an amicus brief filed in support of the Trump v. Barbara Respondents on behalf of and counsel in an amicus brief filed in support of the Department of the Air Force v. Prutehi Guåhan Respondents on behalf of .