I live in Orange County, a few miles from Irvine, where federal agents spent the better part of a decade tearing apart so-called maternity hotels: apartment complexes and gated houses where Chinese nationals paid handlers $40,000 to $80,000 to fly in, hide a pregnancy through customs, and deliver on American soil. The Justice Department indicted 19 people connected to the Irvine operations alone. I’ve watched the vans pull up in Woodbury and Cypress Village. The same calculation plays out at the border, where women time a crossing to a due date. None of this is theoretical to the people who live here. It’s the view from my driveway.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court gave those traffickers a constitutional green light. In Trump v. Barbara, a 6-3 majority struck down the executive order that would have denied automatic citizenship to children born here to parents who are unlawfully present or here temporarily. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment on narrower statutory grounds. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. Roberts held that children born here to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States from the moment of birth, full stop.