Today’s U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming birthright citizenship is a landmark ruling for American equality, rejecting the Trump administration’s policy that would have created a segregated underclass in America. In 2023, an estimated 36,000 Arkansas children had at least one undocumented parent. While the administration’s policy wouldn’t have taken their citizenship away, today’s (June 30) ruling ensures that future children in similar situations will maintain their birthright as American citizens.

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to uphold the right of all children born in the United States as citizens, with all the rights that entails. In doing so, the Court defended the intention and promise of the 14th Amendment, a post-Civil War amendment that guaranteed citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children. Through law and Court precedent, affirmed again today, the amendment applies to almost all babies born in America, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the ruling, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community.”

The U.S. Census American Community Survey estimates that in 2024, about 85,000 children in Arkansas had at least one foreign-born parent (not all of those parents were undocumented). The great majority of those children, about 87%, are U.S. citizens.

Despite the occasional anti-immigrant rhetoric and proposals, Arkansas has a long record of investing in children of immigrants with a consistency that may be surprising.

Decades ago, then-Governor Mike Huckabee took a lot of heat for asserting that ensuring opportunities for the children of immigrants was a smart move for our state’s long-term success. He advocated for higher education access for undocumented immigrants, as well as health care access for children and undocumented pregnant women.

In recent years, our state has made more good decisions to ensure that children of immigrants have access to the American dream. In 2017, the Arkansas Legislature passed and Governor Asa Hutchinson signed a resolution adopting the Immigrant Children’s Health Insurance Act. It extended eligibility for Medicaid and ARKids First to many immigrant children, including those born in the Republic of the Marshall Islands. In 2019, a new state law ensured that otherwise undocumented immigrants with DACA status — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — would qualify for in-state tuition at public colleges and universities. Another law that same year granted the right for DACA immigrants to obtain nursing licenses. In 2021, the Arkansas Legislature passed a similar law regarding teachers’ licenses. For decades, school districts with larger populations of children in immigrant families have invested in early childhood programs like Arkansas Better Chance (ABC) PreK, helping improve children’s chances of educational success by exposing them to English-teaching classrooms before their first day of kindergarten. 

Every legislative session, harmful bills are filed that would take away immigrants’ rights and roll back some of these successes. But for the most part, Arkansas has rejected those efforts and kept these good policies in place.

But we still have a long way to go to establish more equitable laws and policies for all children in our state. Children of immigrants are still more likely to live in poverty than those born to U.S. citizens. And while the Trump administration lost today, its racist deportation and other immigration policies have harmed immigrant families and their children in countless cases. Immigration has declined during his tenure, despite consensus that our national economy will shrink without new immigrants.

While this Supreme Court ruling doesn’t erase the inequity in children’s outcomes, it ensures that we don’t have an insurmountable obstacle in our work to ensure that every child in Arkansas has the resources and opportunities they need to reach their full potential. We’re all, regardless of our parents’ citizenship status, better off for it.