Academic Dean David C. Baluarte Provides Expert Analysis in Historic Birthright Citizenship Case
Leading Scholar on Statelessness Demonstrates Far-Reaching Impact of Proposed Changes in Expert Declaration and CUNY TV Interview
David C. Baluarte, Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and an internationally recognized expert on statelessness protection, has provided expert testimony in a multi-state federal lawsuit challenging President Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship protections guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. His expertise on the issue is further showcased in an interview on CUNY TV’s Asian American Life, which first aired March 11, 2025. The interview comes at a pivotal moment in the ongoing litigation, as courts have temporarily blocked the implementation of the Executive Order while constitutional challenges proceed.
Watch: Dean Baluarte on the Constitutional Fight for Birthright Citizenship
In this interview, Dean Baluarte explains why attempts to end birthright citizenship face steep constitutional barriers. He contextualizes the Wong Kim Ark case within America’s history of immigration law and warns that while the 14th Amendment remains secure, the ultimate impact of xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric itself is real harm to communities—a concern central to his advocacy work.
Expert Declaration Reveals Far-Reaching Consequences
The declaration, filed in State of Washington et al v. Donald J. Trump et al by Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and Illinois, describes findings in various studies that while there are currently about 218,000 individuals who are potentially stateless or at risk of being stateless in the United States, ending birthright citizenship could increase this population by up to 13.5 million by 2050. For individuals who are stateless, Baluarte explains, “there is simply no safe place to go.” They face permanent threat of detention or removal proceedings, cannot travel freely or obtain work authorization, lack access to many social services and healthcare benefits, and as a result cannot participate fully in society.
Drawing on his extensive scholarship and clinical work, Baluarte outlines how statelessness would multiply across generations if these protections are stripped away. The impact would be severe and long-lasting, creating what his declaration calls “a permanent growing class of undocumented individuals” who have no path to citizenship and no country to claim as their own.
Work Grounded in Scholarship and Clinical Practice
Baluarte brings both scholarly and practical expertise to this moment. Prior to joining CUNY Law in 2024, he founded the Immigrant Rights Clinic at Washington and Lee University School of Law, where he supervised students representing immigrants in federal removal proceedings and state court matters. He developed a statelessness docket, developing models for representation to chart paths out of legal limbo, and has spoken and published widely on these strategies. His research and publications have shaped understanding of statelessness in the United States, including his foundational 2012 report “Citizens of Nowhere,” co-published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Open Society Justice Initiative—the first comprehensive review of U.S. jurisprudence relating to statelessness. He also launched the first statelessness legal clinic in the U.S. as a pilot project under the auspices of UNHCR.
Mechanisms of Expanding Statelessness
The declaration details three distinct ways that ending birthright citizenship would create what Baluarte terms “legal limbo” for generations of individuals. First, children born to currently stateless parents would themselves become stateless if denied U.S. citizenship, as they would have no other nationality to claim. Second, some nations’ laws explicitly prohibit parents from transmitting citizenship to children born abroad, meaning those children would become stateless without birthright citizenship protection. Third, even in cases where children might theoretically have a claim to another country’s citizenship, substantive barriers—from poor record-keeping to political disputes between nations to discrimination against certain ethnic or religious groups—can make those claims impossible to establish.
Baluarte points to concrete examples of these mechanisms already affecting communities in the United States. “One example is Kuwaiti Bidoons (a group that lacks a nationality in their homeland), who fled the first Gulf War to the United States and can count on U.S. citizenship for their children who are born here,” he explains. “Those children would otherwise be stateless.” Similar situations arise with children born to Bahamian mothers, as Bahamian law does not permit women to pass nationality to children born abroad.
He also published op-eds on the issue of statelessness during the first Trump administration, and examined the gap between legally recognized statelessness and “de facto” statelessness, arguing for maintaining legal statelessness as the trigger for protection while developing clearer standards to determine statelessness status for those with disputed nationality claims.
Separately, Baluarte has also analogized the effort to end birthright citizenship in the United States to the effort undertaken in the Dominican Republic to exclude children of Haitian descent from Dominican citizenship. That process of racist exclusion began with practices in civil registries, later validated by legislation, upheld by a reinterpretation of a long-established rule of birthright citizenship, and ultimately leading to a reform of the Constitution itself. That process led to an estimated 200,000 people at risk of statelessness, some stripped of nationality after having been issued Dominican birth certificates and passports. It serves as a frightening example of what can happen when nativist forces seize control of executive, legislative, and judicial powers.
Historical Context and Constitutional Stakes
This challenge to birthright citizenship comes more than a century after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all persons born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ status. Wong Kim Ark was the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals in the United States whose U.S. citizenship was challenged during an intense period of anti-Chinese sentiment. Despite having upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act just years earlier, the Supreme Court found no plausible interpretation of the 14th Amendment that would invalidate Won Kim Ark’s citizenship.
President Trump’s Executive Order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” now seeks to revoke birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants on the basis that individuals without formal immigration status are allegedly not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” A fleet of suits argue that the plain text of the 14th Amendment explicitly grants birthright citizenship to all people born in the United States.
Learn More: Watch Full Episode on CUNY TV
For more insights on this critical constitutional issue and its implications for immigrant communities, watch the full episode on CUNY TV’s Asian American Life, available online here.