The courtroom seats filled early this morning. The president sat in the gallery, a first, as if the question of who belongs required his physical presence to adjudicate. Outside, cameras. Inside, two hours of oral argument over five words in the Fourteenth Amendment: subject to the jurisdiction thereof.

My three daughters were born in the United States. Two have birth certificates issued by the state of New Mexico and the third by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. All three are citizens. This has never been a question anyone asked us until now.

Two of my daughters are Navajo. Their biological father is enrolled in the Navajo Nation. Under the Indian Child Welfare Act and under Navajo law, they have the right to enrollment. But when we adopted them, the state issued amended certificates. The originals, the ones that named the people who made them, were sealed. The new documents listed only my husband and me. The legal fiction was complete: as far as the paperwork was concerned, there was no Navajo parent.

So they cannot enroll. Not because they lack the blood quantum. Not because the Nation refused them. Because the document that could prove their lineage was replaced by one that erased it.

I think about this when I hear Solicitor General Sauer argue that the Fourteenth Amendment was written for “newly freed slaves and their children, not the children of aliens.” Justice Alito suggests that illegal immigration was “basically unknown” at the time of the amendment’s adoption, as though the movement of people across borders is a recent invention. Then the argument narrows to the word jurisdiction, as though belonging can be parsed like a contract clause.

The executive order signed in January 2025 would deny citizenship to anyone born on American soil if neither parent holds citizenship or permanent residency. The administration frames this as a correction, a return to original meaning. Cecilia Wang, arguing for the ACLU, put it differently: “Ask any American what our citizenship rule is, and they’ll tell you, everyone born here is a citizen alike.”

Everyone born here. My daughters arrived on American soil, drew first breath in American hospitals, hold American passports. They are citizens of a country now debating whether any of that is sufficient. They are also, by blood, members of a nation that predates this country by centuries, a nation whose enrollment office cannot recognize them because a state sealed the proof.

The same government that blocked my girls’ tribal enrollment through an amended certificate is now arguing that arriving on this soil, by itself, is not enough.

Chief Justice Roberts pushed back on the administration’s reading. Justice Gorsuch dismantled the domicile argument. Even the Court’s conservative majority appeared skeptical. Lower courts have already struck the order down. The legal consensus holds, for now.

But agreement is not permanence. The question before the Court today is constitutional, and carries weight that outlasts a single administration. If “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” can be reinterpreted by executive order, the Citizenship Clause becomes a gate rather than a floor. And gates require gatekeepers.

I have spent years navigating the distance between what my children are and what their documents say they are. Navajo by lineage, American by birth, neither fully recognized by the systems that claim authority over both. The executive order says birth alone may not be enough. The Navajo Nation says the proof they need was taken before they could ask for it.

Three girls at the kitchen table this morning, eating toast, making jokes. One checking her phone. One looking for a hair tie. One reading over my shoulder, asking what jurisdiction means.

I didn’t have a clean answer.