WASHINGTON, April 2 (Reuters) – While many Americans are following the U.S. Supreme Court case involving President Donald Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship, Norman Wong is doing so with a little bit of extra motivation. For him, it is about family.
The San Francisco-area resident is the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American man who was at the heart of a landmark 1898 Supreme Court decision concerning birthright citizenship. That ruling recognized that the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on U.S. soil, including to babies born to parents who are foreign nationals.
Norman Wong, 76, traveled to Washington and was outside the courthouse as the justices heard arguments on Wednesday. He told Reuters afterward that the justices should reaffirm the court’s 128-year-old precedent and rule against Trump.
“I hope America gets this thing right,” the retired carpenter said.
When Wong Kim Ark, a cook who was in his 20s at the time, returned from a trip to his parents’ homeland of China in 1895, customs officials in San Francisco declared him a non-citizen and sought to prevent him from re-entering the United States.
Though he was born in the city’s Chinatown neighborhood, the officials said that because his parents were Chinese nationals, so too was he, and as such he was ineligible for entry due to an 1882 law called the Chinese Exclusion Act that restricted Chinese migration and citizenship. The Supreme Court disagreed.
In the current case, Norman Wong said, the court’s nine justices should “not reinvent our rights” and should uphold “the way birthright citizenship stood for 128 years of precedents.”
Speaking outside the Supreme Court building amid demonstrators defending birthright citizenship, he called the day of the arguments “a special day for me.”
“I see these people and I feel like I definitely don’t stand alone, that if I can help empower them, great. Because in the end, it’s going to take America as a whole to stand up and to make this country right, to keep this ship balanced.”
Trump became the first sitting president to attend Supreme Court arguments, though he left midway through. At issue was the legality of Trump’s executive order signed last year that had instructed U.S. agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called a “green card” holder.
“I think he was there to apply pressure to the judges for their decision,” Norman Wong said. “The decision should be a constitutional decision, not a decision based on fear – fear of retribution, fear of the president.”
The justices through their questions signaled skepticism toward Trump’s directive.
In a post on his Truth Social platform on Thursday, the Republican president wrote, “Kangaroo Court!!!”
(Reporting by Carlos Barria, Julio-César Chávez and Katharine Jackson; Additional reporting by Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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