The US Supreme Court Monday declined to consider whether people born in American Samoa are entitled to birthright citizenship under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Currently, people born in American Samoa can apply for US citizenship but do not receive it automatically at birth.
“The Justices continue to avoid answering basic questions about what rights people from U.S. territories can expect,” Plaintiff John Fitisemanu commented. “People from the territories deserve better from this Court and better from this nation.” American Samoa’s representative in Congress Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen welcomed the outcome, saying the result “helps preserve American Samoa’s cultural priorities and right of self-determination.” Amata urged Congress to pass her bill that would assist US nationals like American Samoans who voluntarily seek citizenship. American Samoa’s government filed a brief with the court arguing that the question of citizenship should be resolved through the regular political process.
Fitisemanu and other American Samoans living in Utah filed the suit, asserting that American Samoa is part of the United States, and the Citizenship Clause should apply to people born there. They argued that the common law definition of birthright citizenship includes any territory under a country’s dominion, and American Samoans should receive the same citizenship granted to people born in other US territories like Puerto Rico. A ruling in Fitisemanu’s favor would have overturned the infamous Insular Cases, which organizations like the ACLU say were “based on expressly racist assumptions about non-white residents in the territories.”
A Utah district court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision. The Tenth Circuit ruled that the language of the Citizenship Clause was ambiguous, and that the Insular Cases provided necessary context to understand it. The court acknowledged the “disreputable” history of the Insular Cases, but held that their framework gives courts more flexibility to preserve cultural autonomy. Because the Supreme Court declined to take the case, the Tenth Circuit’s opinion stands.
