Supreme Court rejects citizenship review for American Samoans

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a request to review a case challenging whether people born in American Samoa have a birthright to U.S. citizenship.

In the case, Leneuotti Tuaua v. the United States, American Samoans argue that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause affords them the right to citizenship because it says that “all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the U.S. and of the state wherein they reside.”

{mosads}The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, however, said the clause does not extend birthright citizenship to those born in the U.S. territory located in the South Pacific Ocean.

“We sympathize with appellants’ individual plights, apparently more freighted with duty and sacrifice than benefits and privilege, but the Citizenship Clause is textually ambiguous as to whether ‘in the United States’ encompasses America’s unincorporated territories and we hold it ‘impractical and anomalous,’ to impose citizenship by judicial fiat—where doing so requires us to override the democratic prerogatives of the American Samoan people themselves,” Judge Janice Rogers Brown said in the appeals court’s decision.