Social Security Offices Brace for Birthright Ruling Fallout [View all]

[justaprogressive]

Workers at the understaffed Social Security Administration are steeling themselves for millions more people to flood field offices, thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision last week that will upend, at least temporarily, the constitutional provision allowing for birthright citizenship. The conservative court’s ruling effectively kills the Enumeration at Birth program that has for decades allowed parents at hospitals, birthing centers, or those using a licensed midwife to request a Social Security number for their newborn at the same time that they register the child’s birth.

Under that program, parents simply checked a box on a form, and their child’s Social Security card arrived by mail about four weeks later. Easy.

Now, parents will likely have to fill out the form and take it into an administration field office, where workers will have to figure out if the baby should be counted as a citizen, a determination they’ve never had to make, for which there is no process.

“This would be a radical change in how Social Security numbers are assigned. It’s not clear at all how this might work,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, adding that Trump officials have given no guidance on how to proceed. “The Executive Order says agencies have 30 days to develop the guidance. But it’s not a 30-day proposition.”

The Supreme Court’s Friday ruling related to the executive order Trump issued on January 20, the first day of his second term. The “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” order denies citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents in the country illegally or temporarily, clarifying that when Trump and his confederates whine about falling birthrates, they mean for white people. As the Prospect’s Robert Kuttner writes, the order is an obvious violation of the 14th Amendment’s promise that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen regardless of who their parents are.

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-07-01-social-security-birthright-ruling-immigration/