Want more patriotism? Look to birthright citizens like me. | Opinion

The Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, concluded that "citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights − to freely participate in our political community."

"The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land.' We keep that promise today," Roberts wrote.

Indeed, the president's executive order was, from the get-go, blatantly unconstitutional. But as much as there were always clear legal reasons to invalidate the order, there was a clear policy reason, too. As a birthright citizen myself, I believe that the president's order attacked the country’s most loyal members, undermining his own call for a more patriotic nation. 

As a child, my birthright citizenship was the thing that I was most proud of. “I was born here!” I would regularly announce at dinner (as if my parents hadn’t been there for the event!). And so it goes for so many immigrants and children of immigrants here in the United States. For us, being American isn’t just a nationality – it is truly who we are. Every night, I thank God not for my legal status, but for my proud identity as a daughter of America.

When Trump issued Executive Order 14160 on his first day returning to the Oval Office, aiming to end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants or to temporary visa holders – like my parents, who were on (the now controversial) H-1B visas at the time of my birth – I remember feeling physically sick. I wasn’t worried about my legal status. I was hurting because, for the first time ever, I felt ashamedto be only a birthright citizen. I had never felt less American in my life.

At birth, America chose me

For all the national dialogue about the president's executive order, I’ve seen little, if any, discussion about what I know from personal experience is the most powerful gift birthright citizenship has to offer: a strong sense of American identity from birth.

I was born and grew up in what was, at the time, a majority-White community. I always felt that my peers “belonged” in America in a way that I did not.

But the thing that gave me confidence, that made me feel equal, was the knowledge that I was American, too. Like them, at birth, my country chose me. Yes, I looked different. Yes, my parents looked different. Yes, our religion was different. But my country chose me. 

America today faces a crisis of patriotism, according to Gallup polling. In 2025, a record-low 58% of American adults said they were extremely or very proud to be Americans. Among Gen Z adults, that number was just 41%.

Critics of birthright citizenship, including Trump himself, regularly bemoan this waning pride in national identity. The president dislikes it so much that, in his first term in office, he launched the 1776 Commission, a group tasked with advising him as to “how to better enable a rising generation to understand the history and principles of the founding of the United States in 1776.”

The commission included no professional historians of the United States – and its final report was roundly attacked by actual professional historians.

Upon his return to office in 2025, Trump quickly revived the group.

Supreme Court stands up for the America I love

What the president fails to understand is that by attempting to upend this unique American tradition of birthright citizenship, he is also working to destroy one of the most powerful ways that we build American pride and American patriotism.

As a child, when I sang in my elementary school’s choir about the “land where my fathers died,” I knew that my ancestors did not come from America. And yet, I felt so intensely a deep pride in these fathers – fathers whom I chose and whom I felt chose me.

It would’ve been impossible to feel that same kind of pride, that same sense of belonging, as a second-tier member of American society. Why would we want that? Why deny the children of this country our nation’s love and love of the nation?

And why delegitimate the identities of so many birthright citizens, myself included?

For birthright Indian Americans in particular, the president’s attack comes at an especially bad time.

Anti-Indian sentiment has reached a fever pitch. Republican 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote in The New York Times in December that his social media feeds were “littered with hundreds of slurs ... and calls to deport me 'back to India.' " Ramaswamy had to explain: "I was born and raised in Cincinnati and have never resided outside the U.S.”

And now, at a moment when the country expresses its distaste for the Indian part of our identity, we also have had to contend with attacks on the American part. Neither part is right, nor is it sufficient.

But now, the Supreme Court stood up. It stood up for me, and it stood for America – the America I knew, the America I love, the America I want back.

Trisha N. Prabhu is the founder and CEO of ReThink Citizens, which supports young digital changemakers, and is studying at Yale Law School. She is a public voices fellow on youth well-being and power of The OpEd Project and Hopelab.