Supreme Court justices will consider the future of birthright citizenship. Here’s how their families came to America

Hannan Blog 59 April 02, 2026

Chief Justice John Roberts’ ancestral line traces to a coal mining village in northwestern England. Justice Elena Kagan’s grandparents were Russian Jewish immigrants. And Justice Samuel Alito’s father was born Salvatore Alati in Italy in 1914 shortly before the family emigrated and his name was “Americanized.”

Other justices inherited family roots deeper on US soil, with their later generations going back to Ireland, France and Spain. The court’s two Black justices, Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson, have written of ancestors brought to America from Africa in bondage.

Each of the nine has a distinct origin story. Some express regular pride in their ethnicity, like Alito, Kagan, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, whose people lived in Puerto Rico long before it became a US territory. For other justices, ethnic heritage is more distant. Justice Neil Gorsuch is a fourth generation Coloradan who defines himself in terms of his family’s Western experience.

They are all about to take up a historic dispute that goes to the core of American identity. From their personal vantage points and separate ideological approaches, they will decide if the concept of birthright citizenship, cemented in the Fourteenth Amendment, endures.