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.
Adopted in 1868 after the Civil War, the amendment states: “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.”
The case to be heard on April 1 arises from President Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025, executive order that would end the guarantee that nearly all children born on US soil become automatic citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status. Relying on the clause “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the administration would exclude children born to undocumented immigrants or people in the US on temporary visas.
The order grew out of Trump’s broader agenda to close the border and was immediately challenged by immigrant advocates, civil rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general. Lower court judges repeatedly said it violates the Fourteenth Amendment and high court precedent. (The justices took up an earlier chapter of the controversy, but only to assess lower court judges’ use of nationwide injunctions to block the Trump policy.)
The justices will directly confront whether the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship prevails. The question is, essentially: When does one become an American?
It’s a query that may bring some of the justices back to their own family origins and individual identities.
John Roberts
Chief Justice John Glover Roberts Jr., who will open the public arguments on April 1 and then lead the justices’ later private vote, descends from English and Slovakian immigrants who were looking for a better life in America. Some were driven out by famine and political strife.
His great-great-grandfather Richard Glover was a miner in the English village of Atherton. Glover and his wife, an Irish woman named Mary Linskey, came to America in 1863. One of their daughters married George Roberts. The son of that couple (also named George and who would be grandfather to the chief justice) settled in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
Their son, John Glover Roberts, was their 10th child, born two decades after their first.
Roberts’ maternal line, tracing to the region of Hungary with family names of Podraczky and Gmucza, came to America a generation after his father’s English side. They, too, made their way to the coal and steel hub of Johnstown in the Allegheny Mountains east of Pittsburgh. That’s where Rosemary Podrasky (as the name was then spelled) met John Glover Roberts.
Their son, the chief justice, bears his father’s name. Roberts and his three sisters grew up in northern Indiana.
Clarence Thomas
The senior-most associate justice, Clarence Thomas became only the nation’s second Black justice when he was appointed in 1991. Thomas has observed that much of his family tree has been lost to him, as it has for most African Americans whose ancestors’ lives here began in slavery.
Thomas wrote in a 2007 memoir that he was descended from West African slaves who resided on the barrier islands and in the low country of Georgia, South Carolina and Florida. He recounted that his people in Georgia were called “Geechees,” while those in South Carolina were known as “Gullahs.” Such descendants of West African slaves maintained, for generations after their freedom, the distinctive creole language and culture.
Relatives of the justice’s father, M.C. Thomas, worked on a plantation just south of Savannah, Georgia. The justice said he believed the ancestors of his mother, Leola Williams, toiled on the same plantation. When Thomas was young and living in Pin Point, Georgia, his father left the family, and his mother had trouble caring for her children. So Thomas and a brother were raised by his maternal grandparents in Savannah. They shaped the course of his life.
“My grandfather was raised by his grandmother, who had been born into slavery,” Thomas said as he described his family’s challenges at a recent University of Notre Dame Law School appearance. “He treasured education deeply, yet he could not read the instructions on his hot water heater. Learning to read was not easy for me either. I kept a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary close at hand; I treasured words, treasured language.”
Thomas also entitled his memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son.”
Samuel Alito
Samuel Anthony Alito Jr.’s grandparents came from small towns in southern Italy. His father’s parents arrived in the US in 1914, carrying their infant son Salvatore, who had been born earlier that year in Saline Joniche, Calabria. That boy would become the justice’s father. The justice’s mother, Rose Fradusco, was born in the US shortly after her own Italian family arrived there.
“There was a lot of pressure at that time to adopt American ways, American habits, even to the point of changing people’s names,” Alito recounted in an interview with an Italian newspaper last December. “So my father’s real name was Salvatore Alati and when at Ellis Island or when children went to school, their Italian first names were all changed to Americanized names, so that’s how my father became Samuel Alito. I think they just didn’t hear what my grandmother had told them, and they didn’t care that much. So that’s how we became Alito.”
The family settled in Trenton, New Jersey, and Alito has often spoken of his parents’ early struggles. “My father was brought to this country as an infant. He lost his mother as a teenager. He grew up in poverty,” Alito said as he introduced himself at his 2006 Senate confirmation hearing.
“Although he graduated at the top of his high school class, he had no money for college, and he was set to work in a factory. But at the last minute, a kind person in the Trenton area arranged for him to receive a $50 scholarship … After he graduated from college, in 1935, in the midst of the Depression, he found that teaching jobs for Italian Americans were not easy to come by, and he had to find other work for a while.” Alito’s mother was also a teacher; he had one younger sister.
Alito in February was awarded the Magna Grecia Foundation international prize, given to prominent individuals who’ve distinguished themselves in the promotion of Italy.
Sonia Sotomayor
Sonia Maria Sotomayor’s ancestors trace to the 1800s in Puerto Rico, when Spain controlled the island. That ended in 1898 (after the Spanish-American War) and the island became a US territory. Then in 1917, under the Jones Act, all persons born in Puerto Rico became US citizens. (People on the island, however, still lack the full privileges of statehood and are unable to vote in presidential elections.)
“My family’s shifting fortunes followed the island’s economic currents: coffee plantations sold off piecemeal until yesterday’s landowners took to laboring in cane fields that belonged to someone else,” Sotomayor wrote in her 2013 memoir.
She added: “We moved from mountainside farms to small towns like San Germán, Lajas, Manatí, Arecibo, Barceloneta; and after a time, on to what were then the slums of Santurce in San Juan; from there the mainland beckoned…..”
Her parents were part of the first wave of Puerto Rican migration to New York in the 1940s. Her mother, Celina Baez, who’d been born near the town of Lajas, left the island when she enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps. She shipped out first to Georgia and then was assigned to the Army’s Port of Embarkation in New York. Her father, Juan Sotomayor, also migrated during World War II to the city.
The couple eventually settled with their daughter, and a younger son, in the Bronx. Sotomayor has called herself a “proud Nuyorican.”
In 2024, as part of a Library of America Latino poetry event, the justice described a verse that was sung at family parties: “En Mi Viejo San Juan” (In my old San Juan) by Noel Estrada. “This poem is like the national anthem for all Puerto Ricans who live outside Puerto Rico,” she said.
Elena Kagan
In a similar manner, Elena Kagan’s Jewish family identity is woven with her American associations. Three of her four grandparents were immigrants, arriving in the US in the early 1900s; the fourth (her father’s mother) was born here of newly immigrant parents. They were all Russian Jews, tracing to lands now part of Ukraine.
Her mother, the former Gloria Gettelman, grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household. After learning English in school and eventually going to Penn State for college and Columbia for a master’s in education, she taught for a quarter century at Hunter College High School.
Her father, Robert Kagan, also went to Penn State, then earned a law degree at Yale. The couple settled in Manhattan, where the future justice was raised. Kagan, who has two brothers, was the first girl to participate in a “bat Torah” at the Orthodox synagogue near her Upper West Side home. “It was the great Jewish experience of my youth,” she has said.
Kagan sometimes wields Yiddish phrases in her opinions and statements from the bench. In a 2023 securities dispute, when a lawyer told the justices, “Well, it’s settled only to the extent no one’s brought it up and forced this issue since (the case of) Atlas Roofing …,” Kagan rejoined, “Nobody has had the, you know, chutzpah – to quote my people – to bring it up since Atlas Roofing….”
The newer justices on the Supreme Court happen to come from families whose foreign-land roots are further behind them.
Neil Gorsuch
Neil McGill Gorsuch’s ancestral line goes back centuries in the US. His paternal side, the Gorsuch line, had origins in England and Germany. His mother, the former Anne McGill, was of Irish stock and her people also came to America several generations earlier. The families moved west and eventually settled in Denver, Colorado.
“My story has its roots in the American West and is the product of the people there,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in a 2019 book. “I grew up a short bike ride away from my grandparents, who did as much to shape me as anyone. My paternal grandfather, John, grew up in Denver when it was a small cow town. … My maternal grandfather, Joe, grew up on the wrong side of town, in a poor Irish and Italian neighborhood….”
John Gorsuch, and his son, David, who would become father to the justice, were both lawyers, as was the justice’s mother Anne. (They had three children.) Anne Gorsuch had the distinction of preceding son Neil to power in Washington, becoming head of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1981.
Gorsuch’s wife, Louise, was born and raised in England, and the justice has written about introducing her to the West that is so close to his heart, including “the proud traditions and sad history of the Native American tribes in New Mexico and Oklahoma.”
Brett Kavanaugh
Brett Michael Kavanaugh has Irish ancestors on both sides of the family.
Kavanaugh’s great-grandfather on his paternal side, Patrick Kavanaugh, came to the US in the late 1800s and settled in Connecticut. One of his sons, Everett, had a son, also given the name of Everett, who married Martha Murphy, whose roots were also predominantly Irish.
Martha’s parents, Tom and Rose Marie Murphy, lived first in New Jersey. After Tom served in World War II in the Pacific, the family moved to Washington, DC; they had five children, Martha the oldest. Everett and Martha would become lawyers as they raised their only son Brett. “When people ask what it is like to be an only child,” Kavanaugh has said, “I say it depends on who your parents are. I was lucky.”
The family still identifies strongly with the home country, and the justice’s father, Everett, gained dual citizenship.
Last year on St. Patrick’s Day, Justice Kavanaugh attended a celebration hosted at Vice President JD Vance’s home with the Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin.
Amy Coney Barrett
Amy Vivian Coney Barrett, who was born and raised in New Orleans, has Irish and French roots that go back many generations in America. Her parents, Michael Coney and the former Linda Vath, had seven children, beginning with daughter Amy.
Unlike other justices who’ve written recent books, Barrett has only lightly sketched in any forebears. She admiringly mentioned one set of grandparents who exchanged letters during World War II when the grandfather was in the US naval service. Her New Orleans heritage largely defines the justice, who has referred to its spicy cuisine and the weekslong Mardi Gras traditions.
“I’m the oldest of seven children. I now have seven children of my own, kind of replicating my parents’ life. I’m also the oldest of 29 grandchildren,” she said at a Library of Congress appearance in March, as she described setting up benches for the children in her extended family to watch the floats and catch the strings of beads thrown.
Ketanji Brown Jackson
Ketanji Brown Jackson, the newest justice bears her heritage overtly. Her given name, Ketanji Onyika, is African. She said it means “Lovely One.” Raised in Miami, Jackson has one younger brother. Her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown, were educators, and her father also became a lawyer.
In her 2024 memoir, Jackson wrote that she’d heard family stories “that forebears had been brought from Africa chained in the holds of ships, and had been held in bondage for centuries, toiling on antebellum plantations in Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina.”
She said that her ancestors were easier to trace in the post-Civil War period, when Black names began appearing in the Freedmen’s Bureau and census records.
Jackson wrote: “Only then would the roots of my family tree – the Browns, Rosses, Greenes, Andersons, Rutherfords, Mayweathers, Armsteads, and others known by variations of these names – finally be inscribed in the ledger of American life.”
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