Michael Baumgartner Aligns Himself with the White Nationalist Legal Campaign Against Birthright Citizenship
He signals his commitment to overturn part of the 14th Amendment which was adopted to protect the citizenship rights of the children of freed slaves
The Choice
The U.S. Supreme Court is about to consider one of the most significant constitutional cases in decades. Representative Michael Baumgartner has joined fifteen other House Republicans, most associated with the party’s far-right and hardline factions, in filing an amicus brief urging the Court to narrow the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.1
An amicus curiae brief allows outside actors to insert arguments directly into a Supreme Court case, even though they are not parties to it. In this case, Baumgartner joined a coordinated congressional effort to support Donald Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which seeks to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are neither citizens nor lawful permanent residents. Children born to lawful permanent residents, aka green card holders, are not targeted by the order.2
The brief was authored by America First Legal Foundation, the legal organization co-founded by Stephen Miller to advance a theory of citizenship that rejects long-settled constitutional doctrine.3 That theory has circulated for years in white-nationalist and “Great Replacement” legal and intellectual circles, where birthright citizenship is framed as a threat to national identity and to white political dominance.4
By signing onto this brief, Baumgartner aligned himself with a legal movement whose authors, sources, and intellectual origins are rooted in white nationalist ideology, a movement that has long characterized birthright citizenship as a threat often referred to as “the browning of America.”5
The Backstop
Baumgartner’s most direct description of how immigration policy is being coordinated came in a closed Ripon Society panel attended by conservative donors and activists. Speaking about his assignment to the House Judiciary Committee, he told the audience it had been “fascinating to see how much the administration looks to House Judiciary Committee Republicans as a backstop for what they’re doing.”6
As an example, Baumgartner said Stephen Miller, who serves as the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and the administration’s lead official on immigration8, sought Judiciary Committee members out for a strategy discussion on immigration policy.7 He also said the very first dinner Pam Bondi held with her team was with Judiciary Committee members at the Department of Justice.9
Baumgartner did not describe these meetings as oversight or as efforts by Congress to check executive power; he described them as coordination, with the House Judiciary Committee positioned to support an agenda set inside the White House. The term he used, “backstop,” is revealing. A backstop reinforces an existing plan. It does not constrain it.
Taken together, Baumgartner’s account describes a coordinated sequence involving the White House, the House Judiciary Committee, and the Department of Justice (DOJ), inverting the normal separation of powers and placing congressional oversight and prosecutorial independence in a supporting role to executive policy.
The Authors
The amicus brief Baumgartner signed was authored by America First Legal (AFL), a legal nonprofit founded by Stephen Miller and Gene Hamilton in April 2021.10 AFL was created to advance immigration theories that had failed repeatedly in courts but had circulated for years inside a network of lawyers, think tanks, and advocacy groups rooted in white nationalist ideology.
Its birthright citizenship theory did not originate in the executive branch or Congress; it was incubated in a parallel legal ecosystem that had long rejected the settled meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.
That ecosystem is well documented. Miller’s role in it predates AFL. In 2019, leaked emails published by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) showed Miller routinely sharing material from VDARE, a white nationalist publication, and promoting The Camp of the Saints, a novel revered in white supremacist circles for its portrayal of nonwhite immigration as the cause of civilizational collapse.11 The SPLC described Miller’s communications as reflecting open white nationalism12, prompting more than 100 members of Congress to call for his resignation in Trump’s first term.13
Gene Hamilton, America First Legal’s other co-founder, provides the institutional bridge. As a senior Justice Department official in the first Trump administration, Hamilton worked closely with Miller on immigration enforcement, including family separation.14 He later authored the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025’s chapter on the Department of Justice15, while continuing to lead litigation efforts through America First Legal. Hamilton’s DOJ blueprint mirrors his AFL arguments, which now appear before the Supreme Court.
The brief’s co-filing partners deepen that picture. Boyden Gray PLLC, a law firm which joined the filing16, is led by Jonathan Berry, an alumnus of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Blackstone Legal Fellowship.17 ADF is designated as an extremist organization by the SPLC.18 Berry also authored Project 2025’s Department of Labor chapter19, linking the brief to a coordinated effort to apply the same legal framework across the federal government.
The intellectual origins of the brief go even further back, to institutions like the Claremont Institute and its Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, which has promoted a “total allegiance” theory of citizenship drawn from nineteenth-century nativist movements.20 That theory treats children born in the United States to disfavored groups as inherently suspect, a logic historically used to justify Chinese exclusion, Japanese internment, and religious loyalty tests.21 It is not an accidental echo. It is the foundation of the argument.
What unites these actors is not party affiliation or policy preference, but a shared premise: that demographic change itself is a threat to be managed through law. In that framework, citizenship is not a birthright but a gatekeeping tool. The Constitution is not a constraint but an obstacle to be overcome by reinterpretation of key clauses.
Only against that background does the brief’s fixation on “birth tourism” make sense. Not as a factual assessment, but as a rhetorical device.
The Distraction
Section VIII of the amicus brief, labeled “Practical Consequences,” is devoted almost entirely to claims about Chinese nationals traveling to the United States to give birth.22
The brief constructs its narrative around an inflated estimate projecting as many as 1.5 million Chinese nationals obtaining U.S. citizenship through birth over the last fifteen years, presenting the claim as a national-security emergency involving foreign manipulation of American citizenship.23
What the brief does not disclose is that its source for birth tourism estimates, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), has been designated an anti-immigrant hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center since 2016.24 CIS was founded by John Tanton, whom the SPLC has documented as a white nationalist25, and for years functioned as a clearinghouse for white nationalist content, regularly circulating material from VDARE and other extremist outlets.26 The brief’s demographic claims were developed by Jason Richwine, a CIS researcher forced to resign from the Heritage Foundation in 2013 after his Harvard dissertation argued that Hispanic immigrants are less intelligent than native-born whites and should be screened using IQ-based immigration criteria.27
The brief amplifies the Center for Immigration Studies’ most inflated claims while ignoring independent corrections by the Niskanen Center, which found that actual birth tourism accounts for fewer than 2,000 births per year after excluding long-term U.S. residents.28 According to the Pew Research Center, at least 250,000 children are born each year in the United States to undocumented parents29, families who live here, work here, and are raising American children. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to ensure that children born on American soil would never be denied citizenship based on the status of their parents. It was a promise that belonging would be determined by birth, not by bloodline. Executive Order 14160 breaks that promise, not for 2,000 birth tourists, but for a quarter of a million children each year. The ratio of actual impact to rhetorical focus is 125 to 1.30
The legal theory the brief advances draws no distinction between a child born in a rented apartment used for a birth tourism operation and a child born to parents with long-term lawful status, such as those holding Temporary Protected Status or H-1B visas, who have lived and worked in the same community for years. Under the proposed “total allegiance” standard, both are denied citizenship on the same terms. The brief’s focus on birth tourism masks the scope of what it actually proposes. A quarter of a million children born to working families become a line in a national-security argument. The people disappear. The policy remains.
Baumgartner does this himself. At an August 2025 Republican fundraising dinner in Spokane, known as “Paint It Red,” he invoked slavery while praising Ulysses S. Grant. “And one of my absolute favorite things about Ulysses S. Grant is that he didn’t have any money, and he got some slaves because his wife was a slave-owning family, and he gave up his slaves, while poor, which would be like, you know, value-wise, like giving up your house.”31 The remark treats enslaved people as a unit of property whose surrender measures Grant’s virtue, not as human beings held in bondage. It is the same operation that runs through the brief: reduce people to abstractions, and the moral cost of what you are advocating disappears. Baumgartner’s praise of President Grant was also imprecise. Grant emancipated one enslaved man, William Jones, while at least four enslaved people owned by his wife’s family continued to labor in the household for several years afterward.32
The Last Resort
On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on his first day back in office.33 The order was immediately challenged in federal courts across the country. Each court to consider it blocked its enforcement, finding that it conflicted with the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.34
Rather than allowing the normal appellate process to proceed, the administration sought Supreme Court review before any court of appeals had ruled. The Court granted certiorari before judgment.35 That procedural step is typically reserved for cases involving genuine national emergencies or irreconcilable conflicts in the lower courts. No circuit split had emerged when the administration sought review.36
It was at that point that the amicus brief Baumgartner signed entered the case. The brief did not introduce new evidence or respond to the courts’ reasoning. It asked the Court to adopt the same theory that lower courts had already rejected in blocking the executive order, reframed through a different narrative emphasis rooted in white nationalist ideology.
This is where Baumgartner’s own description of the Judiciary Committee as a “backstop” becomes operational. The coordination he described extended to supporting a last-ditch legal effort to rescue an executive action that had already been found unconstitutional. Baumgartner’s willing signature did not advance a live legal question. It aligned him with a failed theory kept alive by the white nationalist legal movement that produced the brief.
The Record
The amicus curiae brief Baumgartner signed was filed with the Supreme Court under his name as a sitting member of Congress.37 In that filing, he told the Court that the arguments, sources, and legal theory advanced by America First Legal warranted consideration in deciding the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. That act carries responsibility. A member of Congress who appears as amicus is not registering a vote or issuing a press statement. He is vouching for the contents of a Supreme Court brief.
Baumgartner therefore faces only two explanations. Either he read the filing and endorsed its arguments, including its sources and framing, or he signed a Supreme Court brief without reviewing it. There is no third option that preserves independence, diligence, or credibility.
Regardless of which explanation applies, what remains is the fact of his signature. It appears on a document produced by a network with documented ties to white nationalist ideology. It appears on a brief that advances language and theories drawn from that tradition. It appears on a filing that asks the Supreme Court to narrow who counts as American at birth. This is the record Baumgartner has now created for himself. It is what his constituents will judge him by.
Notes
1. Amicus Curiae Brief of Members of Congress, Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (U.S., filed Jan. 27, 2026), House members listed on page 2 of Interest of Amici Curiae section. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392875/20260128114151284_Birthright%20Citizenship%20Merits%20Amicus%20Brief%201.27.26.pdf
2. Exec. Order No. 14,160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” 90 Fed. Reg. 8,449 (Jan. 20, 2025).https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/
3. Amicus Curiae Brief, Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365, authored by America First Legal Foundation; see signature page. America First Legal Foundation, “America First Legal Files U.S. Supreme Court Brief on Behalf of U.S. Senators and Representatives Supporting President Trump’s Executive Order on Birthright Citizenship,” press release, https://aflegal.org/press-release/america-first-legal-files-u-s-supreme-court-brief-on-behalf-of-u-s-senators-and-representatives-supporting-president-trumps-executive-order-on-birthright-citizenship/
4. Anti-Defamation League, “The Great Replacement: An Explainer.” https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/great-replacement-explainer
5. ADL, “Sovereign American Project” (2021). https://www.adl.org/resources/report/sovereign-american-project
6. Rep. Baumgartner, Ripon Society panel, “Effort to Reach Agreement on Reconciliation,” on or about May 13, 2025. Click this Youtube Video Link. (11:40 to start with the introduction of Baumgartner, 14:40 for his comments on on Backstop, Miller, and Bondi)
7. Ripon Society panel (see endnote 6).
8. White House, “President Trump Announces Senior White House Staff Appointments.” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-trump-announces-senior-white-house-staff-appointments/
9. Ripon Society panel (see endnote 6).
10. America First Legal Foundation, “About.” https://aflegal.org/about/
11. SPLC Hatewatch, “Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails,” Nov. 13, 2019.https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/13/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails
12. SPLC Hatewatch (see endnote 11). https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2019/11/13/stephen-millers-affinity-white-nationalism-revealed-leaked-emails
13. Rep. Don Beyer, joint letter, “Members of Congress Call for Miller’s Resignation.”https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=4647
14. American Oversight FOIA, “Emails Reveal DOJ Officials’ Close Working Relationship with Stephen Miller.”https://americanoversight.org/emails-reveal-doj-officials-close-working-relationship-with-stephen-miller-at-height-of-family-separations/
15. Gene Hamilton, “Department of Justice,” in Mandate for Leadership (Heritage Foundation, 2023), ch. 17.https://www.project2025.org/policy/
16. Amicus brief, Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365, cover page. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392804/20260127131459707_25-365%20TSAC%20CCJ.pdf
17. ADF, “Blackstone Legal Fellowship”; House official bio PDF. https://adflegal.org/training/blackstone/
18. SPLC Extremist Files, “Alliance Defending Freedom.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/alliance-defending-freedom
19. Jonathan Berry, “Department of Labor and Related Agencies,” in Mandate for Leadership (Heritage Foundation, 2023), ch. 18.https://www.project2025.org/policy/
20. Amicus brief at 26, footnote 10 (citing CCJ scholarship). https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392804/20260127131459707_25-365%20TSAC%20CCJ.pdf
21. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898). https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/169/649/
22. Amicus brief at 28–31 (Section VIII). https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392804/20260127131459707_25-365%20TSAC%20CCJ.pdf
23. Amicus brief at 30 (Section VIII calculations). https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392804/20260127131459707_25-365%20TSAC%20CCJ.pdf
24. SPLC Extremist Files, “Center for Immigration Studies.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/center-immigration-studies
25. SPLC Extremist Files, “John Tanton.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/john-tanton
26. SPLC Hatewatch, “More Than An Occasional Crank: 2,012 Times the Center for Immigration Studies Circulated White Nationalist Content.” https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/more-occasional-crank-2012-times-center-immigration-studies-circulated-white-nationalist/
27. “Jason Richwine Leaves the Heritage Foundation After Criticism,” New York Times, May 10, 2013.https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/us/jason-richwine-leaves-heritage-foundation-after-criticism.html
28. Jeremy L. Neufeld, “Birth Tourism Revisited,” Niskanen Center, March 18, 2020. https://www.niskanencenter.org/birth-tourism-revisited/
29. Passel & Cohn, “Number of Babies Born in U.S. to Unauthorized Immigrants Declines,” Pew Research Center, 2016.https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2018/11/01/birthrates-among-u-s-immigrants-and-their-children/
30. Author’s calculation: 250,000 (Pew Research Center) ÷ 2,000 (Niskanen Center) = 125:1.
31. Michael Baumgartner, remarks at “Paint It Red” fundraising dinner, Davenport Grand Hotel, Spokane, WA, August 17, 2025. Transcribed by the author from an audio recording of the event. The event is independently documented in Emry Dinman, “Baumgartner ‘paints it red’ with re-election fundraiser alongside guest speaker, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan,” The Spokesman-Review, August 17, 2025, https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2025/aug/17/baumgartner-paints-it-red-with-re-election-fundrai/.
32. “William Jones,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/people/william-jones.htm; “The Formerly Enslaved Household of the Grant Family,” White House Historical Association, https://www.whitehousehistory.org/the-formerly-enslaved-household-of-the-grant-family; “Myths & Misunderstandings: Grant as a Slaveholder,” American Civil War Museum, https://acwm.org/blog/myths-misunderstandings-grant-slaveholder/.
33. Exec. Order No. 14,160 (see endnote 2). https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/protecting-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/
34. Reuters, “US Supreme Court May Rule Allowing Enforcement of Trump Birthright Citizenship,” June 27, 2025.https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/us-supreme-court-may-rule-allowing-enforcement-trump-birthright-citizenship-2025-06-27/
35. SCOTUS docket, Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365. https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/25-365.html
36. SCOTUS docket (see endnote 33). https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/25-365.html
37. Amicus brief, Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365, cover page. https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/25/25-365/392804/20260127131459707_25-365%20TSAC%20CCJ.pdf
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