By Dr. Marie D. Fouché
When the Supreme Court affirmed on June 30 that the Fourteenth Amendment means what it has meant since 1868– that a child born on American soil is an American–Justice Clarence Thomas dissented.
He warned that the decision “devalues” our citizenship.
I read his words as a physician, a mother, a human-rights advocate and an immigrant from Haiti.
And I read them with a particular ache, because Justice Thomas, of all people, was raised by a grandfather who was himself raised by a woman born into slavery. His own lineage runs straight through the wound the Fourteenth Amendment was written to heal.
That is what makes his argument so striking. He contends the Citizenship Clause was a narrow remedy for the formerly enslaved, since “repurposed” for people its authors never meant to protect. But the architects of Reconstruction had just watched a government decide, by ancestry and convenience, who counted as fully human. Their answer was not narrow. It was categorical: citizenship would come from birth under the Constitution, not from bloodline, wealth, religion, or the political status of one’s parents. Its genius was to strip from government the power to manufacture permanent outsiders.
Justice Thomas’s dissent forgets his own history, and families like the ones I serve will pay for it.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the quiet part plainly, calling her colleague’s reading “myopic” and naming the contradiction at its heart: that a jurist who insists the Constitution is colorblind would read this one Amendment as a race-specific favor rather than the universal principle its text declares. The disagreement is not between me and the Court. It runs through the Court itself.
To call universal citizenship something that “devalues” citizenship turns the history upside down. The Fourteenth Amendment did not cheapen belonging by extending it. It strengthened the Republic by making belonging independent of inherited status: a principle born of one injustice that has since sheltered generations of immigrants, refugees, and stateless people.
The same instinct is already reshaping lives on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where I work. Days earlier, the Court cleared the way to end Temporary Protected Status while narrowing the power of judges to review that decision at all. Notice the pattern: narrow who is allowed to belong, then shield the government from having to answer for it. When courts step back from decisions that determine whether a person can stay, work, or be sent back to a country in collapse, the promise of equal justice becomes a promise no one is left to enforce.
For roughly 350,000 Haitians, and for families in my own community, this is not doctrine. It is a father weighing whether it is safe to drive to work. It is a mother rationing her child’s medication because a clinic visit now feels like a risk worth avoiding. As a physician, I can tell you what sustained fear does to a body: it drives up blood pressure, disrupts sleep and pregnancies, and settles into children as an anxiety they will carry for decades. As a Haitian, I know what it means to be told the country you would be returned to is safe when it is not.
When the courts step back, the Constitution’s other guardians are meant to step forward. What the justices declined to protect, the Senate can still write into law. So I am one of thousands now waiting, writing letters, for senators willing to do what a majority of this Court would not: vote to extend Temporary Protected Status, and affirm in statute that people who have lived, worked, paid taxes, and raised American children here for years are not disposable. A ruling can strip a protection; only Congress can restore it. Justice Thomas and those who think like him have told us plainly what they believe. Now the Senate must tell us what it believes: and whether the wrong done from the bench will be left to stand.
Rights have never stayed confined to the people who first won them. Equal protection, due process, and citizenship grew stronger precisely because courts recognized that the principle outlives the injustice that produced it. To read the Fourteenth Amendment as though it belonged only to 1868 is to turn America’s Second Founding into a museum piece instead of a living safeguard.
I want every child born on this soil to inherit the living thing, not the relic. That is the promise, and it is worth defending in plain terms: that the circle of human dignity widens with each generation, and that a nation proves itself not by how it treats the powerful, but by whether it keeps its word to those with the least power to demand it.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.
