America Just Played Its Best World Cup Men’s Soccer Game Ever. It Wouldn't Have Been Possible Without Birthright Citizenship.

As the Supreme Court weighs ending birthright citizenship, the star American player who just gave the U.S. its best-ever World Cup win shows us exactly what our country would lose without that right.

Jun 16, 2026

On Friday night at SoFi Stadium, in front of 70,492 fans, the United States men’s national team played the best game in its men’s World Cup history and beat Paraguay 4-1. It was the first time the program has ever scored four goals in a World Cup match, and the loudest the sport has ever been on American soil. The man at the center of it was Folarin Balogun, a 24-year-old striker who scored two goals and became the first American man to score more than once in a World Cup game since Bert Patenaude did it almost a century ago, at the inaugural World Cup in 1930.

Balogun, raised in London, is an American citizen only because his pregnant mother got stranded in New York for a few weeks in the summer of 2001. The United States grants citizenship to nearly everyone born on its soil, so he became a citizen the moment he was born in Brooklyn. The Trump administration has spent much of its second term trying to remove that right, and under the president’s plan, America’s newest soccer hero would never have suited up for the U.S.

How Balogun Became an American Citizen

Balogun’s parents, Florence and Ben, are Nigerian and were living in London in 2001. They took a summer trip to New York City while Florence was seven months pregnant, and when she went to board her flight home, airline staff told her she was too far along to fly. She could not get medical clearance in time, so she gave birth in Brooklyn on July 3. The family returned to England when Balogun was two months old, and he grew up there, training in Arsenal’s youth academy from the age of eight and playing for England’s youth teams through age 21 before deciding to represent the United States, a switch FIFA approved in 2023.

He could make that choice because of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says that anyone born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction is a citizen. Balogun’s Brooklyn birth made him American automatically, regardless of the fact that his parents were Nigerian citizens passing through on a tourist trip. On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14160, which declares that a child born here is not a citizen if the mother was in the country lawfully but temporarily, on something like a tourist visa, while the father is not a citizen or permanent resident. Those terms describe Balogun’s birth exactly.

The Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment

Birthright citizenship was not in the original Constitution, which left the question of who counted as a citizen up to the individual states. That arrangement was disrupted in 1857, when the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott that no person of African descent, enslaved or free, could ever be a citizen of the United States. The Scott decision is widely considered one of the factors that helped push the country into the Civil War. After the war ended slavery, Congress faced the problem of millions of formerly enslaved people and free Black residents who had been born in the country but denied any claim to it. Lawmakers passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and then enshrined birthright citizenship into the Constitution through the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868.

The purpose was to make citizenship a matter of where you were born rather than who your parents were or what race you belonged to. Gerald Neuman, a constitutional scholar at Harvard, describes its central aim as "preventing a permanent hereditary caste of people who are locked out of citizenship across generations and left vulnerable to exploitation." Congress also understood that the amendment would cover more than freed slaves. By the 1860s, the same question hung over Chinese immigrants arriving on the West Coast, and lawmakers debated their children specifically before deciding the rule would apply to people of every race.

Wong Kim Ark and Legal Challenges to Birthright Citizenship

The first major test of birthright citizenship after Reconstruction came in 1898 from a San Francisco cook named Wong Kim Ark. He had been born in the city to Chinese parents who were lawful residents but, under the Chinese Exclusion Act, could never themselves become citizens. When Wong returned from visiting family in China, the government refused to let him back into the country, arguing that a child of Chinese subjects was not truly American. The Supreme Court disagreed, ruling in a 6-2 decision that he was a citizen by birth because he was born on U.S. soil and his parents were not diplomats. The case cemented the principle that the children of immigrants are Americans regardless of their parents’ status, and it has held for more than a century.

Congress wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to protect freed Black Americans, and opponents almost immediately tried to deny it to the children of Chinese immigrants. Trump’s executive order is much more extreme. His administration argues that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" excludes the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors, a reading Neuman calls "either crazy or dishonest," since the Court already ruled in Wong Kim Ark that the language was only ever meant to exempt narrow cases like the children of foreign diplomats. Federal courts have repeatedly blocked Executive Order 14160 as unconstitutional, and the Supreme Court heard arguments in April. They are expected to issue a ruling by early July, before this World Cup is over. By the government’s estimates, more than 250,000 babies born in the United States each year would be affected.

Other Notable Birthright Citizens

Balogun is far from the only American who exists, legally speaking, because of birthright citizenship. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s opponent in the most recent presidential election, was born in Oakland in 1964 to a mother from India and a father from Jamaica, both studying at Berkeley on temporary visas, the precise situation the executive order now targets. Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio was born in Florida to Cuban immigrants. Usha Vance, the wife of Vice President JD Vance, was born in California to Indian immigrants who came to the country as students. A number of other figures in Trump’s circle owe their citizenship to the Fourteenth Amendment. Legendary actor and martial artist Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco in 1940 while his parents were touring the country with a Chinese opera company, and he returned at eighteen to claim his American citizenship, a path almost identical to Balogun’s.

Trump’s executive order targets the circumstances that produced many of these Americans, children born to parents who were undocumented, in the country on temporary visas, or simply passing through. Removing the law would have closed the door on countless generals, cabinet members, artists, and athletes, along with the quieter millions whose names never reach the news.

The Stakes of the Supreme Court Ruling

Within weeks, the justices will decide whether the country keeps the standard it has used since 1868 or narrows it for the first time since Dred Scott. A change could take children who are currently citizens and render them effectively undocumented. Researchers who compared countries that loosened or tightened their citizenship rules, including Germany and Ireland, found that children granted citizenship at birth enroll in school earlier and commit far fewer crimes as they grow up, while those denied it live under the constant fear of removal. The United States has been unusually good at absorbing the children of immigrants, and birthright citizenship is a large part of why.

Balogun’s two goals were a reminder of what that openness produces. Born in Brooklyn by pure chance and raised an ocean away, Balogun came back a quarter century later to help give his birth country the best night in the history of its men’s national team. The rule the president wants to end is the only reason he was eligible to do it. Our Constitution, as it has read for more than a century and a half, granted him citizenship the moment he was born, and on Friday night seventy thousand people in Los Angeles saw exactly what that decision was worth.