Cecillia Wang: “Born on This Soil”

This is an entirely fictional creative work. It does not represent the actual thoughts, words, or views of any real person. This is satire and literary fiction for entertainment purposes.

April 02, 2026
Cecillia Wang — National Legal Director, American Civil Liberties Union

Born on This Soil

April 2, 2026

I need to get this down before the adrenaline metabolizes into something I won't recognize.

The courtroom was cold. Not metaphorically — actually cold, the marble holds it. I had on the navy suit, the one David says makes me look like I'm about to depose someone even at dinner, and I was still cold. You'd think after two decades of federal litigation I'd stop noticing the temperature of courtrooms. I noticed today.

He was sitting right there. Maybe ten feet to my left. The President of the United States came to watch oral argument — apparently a first, which the press is going to make a whole thing about, and fine, let them. What I keep coming back to is this: I could hear him shift in his seat. That's how close. At one point early on, when I was laying out the textual argument on the Citizenship Clause, I heard what I think was him leaning over to whisper to someone. I didn't look. You don't look. You talk to the nine justices and you stay in the argument and you do not let the spectacle become the substance. That's what they want.

But here's what I didn't say in any of the press availabilities after: my hands were shaking for the first forty seconds. Not visible shaking — I had them flat on the podium, I've done this enough times — but that interior tremor, the one that lives in the forearms. It wasn't stage fright. It was the weight of it. The argument I was making is the argument for my own existence as an American citizen. My parents were on student visas when I was born in Oregon. If this executive order stands, a baby born under the same circumstances today is... what? Stateless? A person without a country? The Solicitor General's position on that was genuinely incoherent and I think Roberts saw it.

Gorsuch was sharp. I'd prepped for skepticism from him — we war-gamed it extensively — but when he pressed the SG on the original public meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," I thought: okay. He's where the text leads him. Barrett too. She asked the government's lawyer a question about Wong Kim Ark that he clearly didn't want to answer, and he tried to distinguish it, and she just waited. That silence from a justice is worth more than any interruption.

I called David from the car. He said, "How do you feel?" and I said, "Cautiously optimistic about the legal landscape," and he laughed and said, "I asked how you feel, not for the CNN hit." Fair. How do I feel. I feel like I argued to nine people that the Constitution means what it says, and that shouldn't be extraordinary, and yet it is, and the fact that it is means something has gone very wrong.

The team was incredible. Lee was feeding me notes that I mostly didn't need but the discipline of the prep is the point. Omar stayed up until 3am last night running through hypos on the Insular Cases and I need to remember to actually thank him tomorrow, not just the performative thank-you in the group text.

I keep thinking about my mother. She would have been — I don't know what she would have been. Proud? Terrified? Both, probably. She came here to study biochemistry and ended up raising two American kids and she never once treated that as anything other than settled fact. "You were born here. You are from here." Full stop.

What I almost said at the podium — and didn't, because it would have been self-indulgent, because the law doesn't need my biography to be right — is that the Fourteenth Amendment isn't an abstraction to me. It's the reason I was allowed to become the person standing at that podium at all.

I should eat something. I had half a granola bar at 6am and coffee from the hotel lobby that tasted like it had been sitting since the Lochner era.

We won't know until the opinion comes down. Probably June. The signals were good. But I've read enough tea leaves that turned out to be just leaves.

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