During the Jim Crow era, countless Black Americans were effectively denied official proof of their citizenship at birth. While there wasn’t always an explicit law that said Black children couldn’t have birth certificates, state and local governments built a system designed to keep them out. Segregated, underfunded hospitals often refused or neglected to record Black births. Many Black families relied on midwives for home births, but midwives were frequently barred from registering those births or weren’t given the training or authority to do so. Local clerks and county offices routinely refused to help Black families navigate the registration process, leaving entire generations without formal documentation.
The impact was profound and lifelong. Without a birth certificate, Black Americans struggled to enroll in school, prove their age, qualify for voting, travel, get a driver’s license, secure employment, or collect Social Security benefits. Even decades later, many Black elders have been forced to rely on church baptism records, handwritten family Bibles, or sworn affidavits from elderly relatives to prove when and where they were born. Some states eventually created delayed birth registration processes to help fix these injustices, but the damage was done. This wasn’t an accident. It was a deliberate way to enforce second-class citizenship through bureaucracy—by denying people the paperwork that proved they belonged.
This history matters urgently today, because on June 27, 2025, the Supreme Court issued a ruling in Trump v. CASA that cleared a path for the Trump administration’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to certain babies born in the U.S. Specifically, the Court didn’t rule that Trump’s order was constitutional—it didn’t even decide whether denying birthright citizenship is legal under the 14th Amendment. Instead, it limited the power of lower federal courts to block such policies nationwide. The ruling said that courts can only issue narrow injunctions covering the plaintiffs in front of them, rather than nationwide orders.
What this means in practice is that the Trump administration can now try to enforce its order in states that didn’t participate in lawsuits—denying birth certificates to babies born in the United States to undocumented parents, and forcing families to sue on a case-by-case basis. The administration isn’t changing the 14th Amendment, which clearly states that anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen. But by withholding birth certificates, it effectively makes these U.S.-born children undocumented in practice. Without that document, they’ll have no way to get a Social Security number, passport, or state ID. They will be unable to prove their citizenship.
This is the same old Jim Crow tactic in modern form: using bureaucracy to deny rights. It doesn’t openly say these children aren’t citizens—it just denies them the proof they need to live as citizens. It’s a citizenship tax on poor immigrant families, because to fight back, they will need to hire lawyers, pay filing fees, take time off work, and navigate a hostile court system. Many will be unable to afford the fight. As a result, their children will grow up in America without legal proof that they belong here, even though the Constitution guarantees it.
What makes this even more cynical is that the burden is placed entirely on the poor. Wealthy families could fight these denials in court. Poor families likely can’t. This isn’t about enforcing immigration law. It’s about making it too expensive and frightening for the most vulnerable families to claim the rights their children were born with.
But there is hope. Even if Trump’s policy denies birth certificates today, hospitals are legally required to keep detailed birth records. Those records don’t disappear just because an administration wants to pretend these babies don’t count. In the future, a new administration or a court decision can reverse this policy, and those medical records can be used to prove these children were born here and are entitled to their birthright citizenship.
This is a fight about more than paperwork. It is about whether America will repeat the injustices of Jim Crow—denying citizenship through bureaucracy and poverty—or whether it will honor the Constitution’s promise that all people born here are citizens, equal in rights, dignity, and belonging.
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