This California man won citizenship for all. Now that right is being challenged in court

This week, as the Supreme Court takes up the issue of birthright citizenship, the legacy of Wong Kim Ark will be front and center.

More than a century ago, the Chinese American man from California successfully defended his right to birthright citizenship before the Supreme Court — a victory that’s been foundational to the country’s modern-day understanding of who is American.

Now Wong’s landmark case is being cited in the flurry of briefs filed against President Donald Trump’s executive order to deny U.S. citizenship to babies born to undocumented immigrants and lawful permanent residents.

That policy has been put on pause — for now. After Trump introduced the order on his first day in office, three federal judges issued nationwide injunctions pending litigation. But the Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to reject the injunctions when it hears oral arguments focused on their national scope on Thursday.

Wong Kim Ark.

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Should the executive order take effect, ramifications for children could be dire. Legal experts say they could face deportation and lose access to education and healthcare benefits.

In the countdown to the hearing, Wong’s case has been invoked by lawyers, immigrants’ advocates and his own descendants.

Norman Wong, who’s related to Wong through his father, said he’s worried about the children of immigrants.

“Are they going to be stateless? We can't have that,” Wong said. “They're not my children, but in a sense, we should embrace them and think of them as our children, as Americans."

The 14th Amendment

Birthright citizenship became the law of the land after the Civil War. Congress adopted the 14th Amendment in 1868, overturning the Dred Scott decision, which said enslaved and free people of African descent were not U.S. citizens.

Under the amended Constitution, all people born or naturalized in the U.S. were guaranteed citizenship.

Several years after the 14th Amendment was adopted, sometime in the early 1870s, Wong Kim Ark was born to Chinese parents in San Francisco’s Chinatown. They lived above the family grocery during a time of growing animosity and violence toward the Chinese.

Norman Wong stands outside Wong Kim Ark's childhood home in San Francisco's Chinatown.

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“It’s the age-old immigration story of our nation,” said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia who wrote about Wong Kim Ark in her book You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to the Dreamers.

While Chinese immigrants were welcomed in the 1840s and 1850s during the Gold Rush in California and seen as vital in the building of the transcontinental railroad, they were scapegoated during economic downturns.

“There was the view by some that they were taking people's jobs, and also repeated constantly was that they couldn't integrate, that they were not capable of joining a democracy,” Frost said.

The backlash resulted in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred most Chinese immigration for decades. But Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, and after his parents moved back to China when he was a boy, he traveled freely between the countries.

He had married a woman in China and started a family by 1895, when he returned by himself to San Francisco, where he’d been working as a cook. But this time, he was not allowed to get off the steamship.

Top U.S. government officials had been wanting to roll back birthright citizenship and wanted to use Wong as their test case, Frost said.

Wong could have returned to China, but he decided to fight back with the help of lawyers hired by a Chinese benevolent association. After four months, Wong was released on bail. Over the next three years, his lawyers took his case all the way to the Supreme Court.

The court ruled, 6-2, in favor of Wong, upholding the earlier interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

UC Irvine law professor Robert Chang said that justices had a key consideration.

“The children of many European immigrants would lose their citizenship if birthright citizenship was not recognized,” Chang said. “Even back then, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the practical consequence if they decided otherwise.”

Chang leads the UCI law school’s Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, which filed an amicus brief against Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, citing the Wong case.

Chang says the country is now at a similar crossroads as during Wong’s day.

“It does have to do with the central question of what does it mean to be an American?" Chang said. "Who do we accept as an American?"

Post-victory

Even after winning the Supreme Court case, Wong had to continue to prove he was American.

Frost said that during a stint living in El Paso, Texas, Wong was detained by immigration authorities who assumed he was an immigrant and tried to deport him.

He had to post a bond of several hundred dollars.

“It must have been extremely discouraging that he was continuing to fight for his citizenship and presumed not to be a citizen based solely on his race,” Frost said.

Wong Kim Ark is pictured in an immigration application asserting his U.S. citizenship.

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In recent decades, Wong’s story has received more emphasis in schools. Civil rights and Asian American organizations view him as a pioneer whose legacy lives on in his own family.

Wong eventually settled in China, after living most of his life in the U.S. But Frost said that historic archives show that three of Wong’s four sons moved to the U.S. and because of birthright citizenship were admitted — albeit after much questioning — as Americans.

Norman Wong, a retired carpenter from the East Bay, said he didn’t even know his forebear’s historic contribution until about 20 years ago when reporters contacted his father, whom records indicate was Wong’s youngest son.

Since Trump’s executive order, Norman Wong has been speaking out at events around the state about Wong Kim Ark.

“I'm proud to be of his blood,” Wong said. “I really do mean that. He stood up — not just for himself, but for all of us.”