On Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a case challenging President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order banning birthright citizenship. Justices seemed skeptical of the administration’s argument, but by taking up birthright citizenship at all, they showed how much ground nativists have gained since Trump’s first term. The 14th Amendment is quite clear: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump seeks to overturn this and create a new, effectively stateless American underclass, and he’s gotten alarmingly far.

Hours after being sworn back into office for his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Under the order, children born to undocumented mothers — or to women in the country on non-immigrant visas — would no longer be citizens upon birth, unless the children’s fathers were citizens or permanent residents. The order’s provisions would take effect 30 days after it was issued. It was immediately challenged in court and several federal injunctions prevented its implementation, meaning birthright citizenship remains the law of the land for now.

Trump’s efforts hinge on the meaning of a specific clause: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The administration contends that noncitizens and those who don’t have permanent residency are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, since they’re actually loyal to a foreign power. This interpretation would reverse not only centuries of US law but also precedent set by English common law, leaving hundreds of thousands of children without status or stateless upon birth. Karen Tumlin, the director of the Justice Action Center, called the case a “canary in the coalmine for our democracy”: if Trump can end birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen, then no constitutional protection is safe.

All but the most conservative justices seemed unconvinced. Their questions largely focused on two landmark decisions. One was Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case in which the court decided that enslaved people were not citizens — which the 14th Amendment was ratified partly to overturn. The other was United States v. Wong Kim Ark, an 1898 case in which the court ruled that, despite the Chinese Exclusion Act, the American-born children of Chinese nationals were indeed US citizens.

After Justice Clarence Thomas asked Sauer how the citizenship clause responds to Dred Scott, Sauer acknowledged that the 1857 decision “imposed one of the worst injustices in the history of this court.” But he argued that Congress specifically ratified the 14th Amendment to grant citizenship to “newly freed slaves and their children” who, according to Sauer, had “a relationship of domicile” to the United States and no “relationship to any foreign power.”

Nineteenth-century legislators, Sauer argued, couldn’t have foreseen the problem of birth tourism. “There are 500 — 500 — birth tourism companies in the People’s Republic of China whose business is to bring people here to give birth and return to that nation,” Sauer said. The current interpretation of birthright citizenship “could not possibly have been approved by the 19th century framers of this amendment,” he said. “We’re in a new world,” he continued, “where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a US citizen.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was questioning Sauer, appeared unswayed. “It’s a new world,” he agreed, but “it’s the same Constitution.”

Chief Justice John Roberts called Sauer’s examples of existing exceptions — including children of ambassadors or enemies during a hostile invasion — “very quirky” and not necessarily comparable to“a whole class of illegal aliens who are here in the country.” Justice Elena Kagan noted that most of Sauer’s brief focused on people who are temporarily in the country on visas — but Trump’s executive order was clearly intended to restrict immigration, and the president has said so himself.

In 2019, Trump called birthright citizenship a “magnet for illegal immigration.” Last year, presidential adviser Stephen Miller said the US-born children of immigrants are just as much of a problem as the immigrants themselves. “With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful,” Miller said in a Fox News interview, citing the Somali-American community, which the administration would soon target in Minneapolis, as an example. “You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.”

The administration has sought to restrict legal immigration in all its forms: it implemented a steep fee for H-1B work visas, has signaled it may end a work program for international students, and enacted a travel ban on several countries that is even affecting World Cup players. The operation is barefacedly racist. The president famously complained about “all these people from shithole countries” who migrate and expressed his desire to have “more people from Norway.” Last year, he cut the refugee resettlement cap to just 7,500 and prioritized the resettlement of white South Africans. The Department of Homeland Security has linked the “homeland” to a decidedly white vision of Manifest Destiny that, like debates about birthright citizenship, harkens back to the nineteenth century.

Experts are broadly in agreement that most justices weren’t convinced by the administration’s argument, but it’s not clear exactly how the court will rule.

If the court did hand Trump an unexpected victory, a series of grim questions would immediately come into play — starting with when the change kicks in. The order was supposed to be implemented on February 19, 2025, thirty days after Trump signed the order, and would have gone into effect if not for a number of federal injunctions. “If the court sides with Trump, it will have to decide on a date on which to begin applying the president’s interpretation of the 14th amendment,” César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor of civil rights and civil liberties at the Ohio State University College of Law, told The Verge. “Anyone born on or after that date and described in Trump’s order would be treated as a migrant rather than a U.S. citizen.”

Sauer asked the court to apply Trump’s executive order “proactively” and not retroactively, and backdating the change to 2025 would pose a number of problems, calling the citizenship of millions of children into question.

The Trump administration is trying to narrow who counts as an American while simultaneously pushing for policies that prevent noncitizens from participating in public life. The administration has tried to prohibit states from offering in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants who live there, revoked accreditation for training centers that work with noncitizen truckers, and has broadly sought to turn America into a “papers, please” country.

Trump was in the audience during Wednesday’s arguments, making him the first sitting president to attend oral arguments before the Supreme Court. His presence may have intended to intimidate skeptical justices into taking his side. Norman Wong, a direct descendant of Wong Kim Ark, was also outside the courthouse, according to the New York Times. Wong and his family embody the stakes of this case, and he had a message for the justices: “They will be shamed for history if they get this wrong.”

With NASA planning to launch four astronauts on Wednesday on its Artemis II mission, the race to return to the Moon is back on. The current mission will see astronauts aboard the Orion capsule travel around the Moon before returning to Earth in 10 days’ time. They’ll be testing out the hardware and systems that could soon see Americans standing on the Moon for the first time in more than 50 years in the Artemis IV mission scheduled for 2028. NASA isn’t ready to land people on the Moon just yet, but that’s the aim for the next five years: to not only get people onto the Moon but establish a lengthy human presence on its surface.

That’s NASA’s selling point of Artemis, compared to the Apollo missions of the 1960s and ’70s — we won’t just be visiting the Moon for a few days, but rather inhabiting it for a long period of time. Exactly how long is still unclear, but the idea is to build a Moon base that allows astronauts to live on the lunar surface for weeks or even months at a time.

That makes logistics much more complicated, as astronauts won’t be able to bring all the supplies and resources they would need along with them. Instead, they would need to make use of the limited resources that exist on the Moon, in a process called in-situ resource utilization. Rather than hauling a huge amount of water along for the ride from Earth, for example, we’ll just go and find some ice on the Moon and melt that to use instead. Simple, right?

It’s really not. There’s the science. And there’s the law.

The Moon’s environment is harsh and inhospitable, with dangerous space radiation, dusty material called regolith that is sharp as glass and destroys equipment, and a different level of gravity to contend with. Though less of a fantasy than the wild Mars colonization plans promised by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, NASA’s aim to establish a base on the Moon by 2030 is still wildly optimistic. Throughout its messaging on Artemis, NASA has emphasized the importance of identifying and extracting resources from the Moon, including water for fuel, helium-3 for energy, and rare earth elements like scandium that are used in electronics. It’s hard to know how abundant these resources are until they’ve been more fully mapped and assessed, but there is at least potential value, as they are required for sustaining habitation on the Moon. And that’s the justification underlying much of Artemis: Resources are needed to support a Moon base, so we need to build a Moon base to search for them.

The agency has even described these efforts as a “lunar gold rush.” But this points to a problem with Artemis that isn’t solvable by developing new technologies: Some experts say that extracting resources from the Moon is a violation of international law.

There isn’t a huge amount of international law that applies to space exploration, but what there is is very clear in one regard: No one owns the Moon. The Outer Space Treaty (which was signed nearly 60 years ago but is still the main basis for international law in space today, if you can believe it) is very explicit regarding the principle of non-appropriation, meaning that nations can’t claim sovereignty over any body in space. But what about extracting resources? There, we get into sticky territory.

“The US considers that resource extraction is not appropriation,” says Cassandra Steer, space law expert and founder of the Australasian Centre for Space Governance. Many international space lawyers, including Steer, have argued that this is unlawful. “That is an incorrect interpretation of the Outer Space Treaty. You’re trying to carve out a loophole.” After all, if a nation started digging up resources from a territory it didn’t have claim to on Earth these days, that would cause a few legal problems.

The US has been tactical in its approach to this issue, through the use of an agreement called the Artemis Accords. This is not an international treaty, but rather an agreement signed by over 60 nations about adopting high-level principles regarding space exploration and the Moon in particular. Many of these principles are sound, reasonable approaches to space exploration, covering topics like the sharing of scientific data, consideration of safety and emergency procedures, and adherence to the peaceful use of space.

But the document also includes sections specifically allowing the extraction and use of space resources, saying that this doesn’t conflict with the principle of non-appropriation, and allowing specific nations to establish “safety zones” around areas of their lunar activity where other nations cannot interfere.

That’s not exactly saying that whoever gets to the Moon first and claims a chunk of it now owns it, but it is implicitly saying that whoever starts activities like research or mining in a certain lunar region now gets to extract resources from that region and other countries can’t stop them. It’s not owning a piece of the Moon, but it is getting priority access to it by drilling, scraping, and occupying a strategic location for its potential value.

It’s hard not to draw a parallel between this approach and the history of land grabs across the American West in the 19th century, especially regarding access to key resources such as water. “I think the Artemis Accords might open the door for these sorts of access claims on the Moon,” says Rebecca Boyle, journalist and author of a book on the topic, Our Moon. “The accords do say that safety zones should be relevant to the activities at hand, but again, I think a creative attorney or a nifty legal argument could lead to a situation where someone who gets to a spot first uses the safety zone rule to lay claim to whatever is there.”

The smart move on the part of the US was integrating the accords into the Artemis program, so countries that wanted to be involved in Artemis had to sign the document. With a handful of key players like Canada, Japan, Australia, the UAE, and the UK signed on, many other countries, including France, Israel, Saudi Arabia, India, and Germany, followed suit.

“And so, it was a bit of a strong-arming of the US to say, if you want in on our program, you have to agree with our international law interpretation. It is forcing what we call opinio juris in international law,” Steer explains. The power of this consensus from so many countries is that, if resource extraction is tolerated in practice, the original intention of the treaty can be in effect overruled by a broadly accepted interpretation.

Steer summed up NASA’s approach bluntly: “You’re just trying to rewrite the treaty, and somehow you’ve convinced 60 countries to do it with you.”

The real elephant in the room of this legal wrangling is China, which did not sign the Artemis Accords and is on course to set its own astronauts on the Moon perhaps even before the US can. China and the US have practically zero relationship when it comes to space activities, but China has been building its own international cooperations for its lunar program, including signing an agreement with Russia and carrying payloads from various European countries and Saudi Arabia on its lunar rovers. China has plans to build its own Moon base with Russia called the International Lunar Research Station, and the US is aggressively pushing its Moon program to try to beat its rivals to the punch.

“The multi-trillion- dollar question is, why go to the Moon? And it is, to my mind, purely geopolitical,” Steer says. That’s certainly what drove the US during the last space race, when the Cold War was in full swing and racing the Soviet Union to the Moon was not just a matter of political power but also an attempt to demonstrate who had the superior political ideology. Now, in the age of America First Trumpism, the US is attempting to prove its power and capability once again, but the nationalist rhetoric fails to capture the reality of space exploration, which is that it’s now dependent on international partnerships and cross-border cooperation.

Today, it’s not only prestige that is at stake but also access to space resources, from controlling cislunar orbits and lunar locations to controlling the materials required for the Moon’s further exploration, such as ice or helium-3. NASA, after all, has been notably circular in its justifications for Artemis: We need to send astronauts to the Moon to secure access to ice, because we need access to water to support human exploration. There are potential scientific justifications for a Moon mission, from learning about the formation of the Solar System to using the Moon as a base for building a powerful telescope, but these haven’t been well articulated or widely promoted by NASA.

“The real justification, the hidden one, is who gets to have political dominance,” Steer says. “Space is just another domain where geopolitics are playing out. It’s no different from the AI race, it’s no different from competition around other resources, around oil, around water … It’s another domain where the US is grasping at straws to remain the single dominant power, and discovering that actually it can’t.”