Wong is of Japanese and Chinese descent. But whenever he asked his father about their Chinese ancestry, his dad wouldn’t or couldn’t say much. “It brought tears to his eyes,” recalled Wong, now 74. “That was a history he didn’t readily share.”

Staying at an acquaintance’s home in Vancouver, Wong and his wife trawled libraries, searching for any trace of a man who his father last heard was in the city. But “there was no record of him,” Wong said. The newlyweds returned home to San Francisco, disappointed.

It would take almost 15 years for both Wong and his father to learn the full story — that the S.F.-born Wong Kim Ark was the subject of a landmark 1898 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that established birthright citizenship for anyone born on American soil.

In 1895, Wong Kim Ark returned from a trip to China and was forced to remain on a steamship docked in the Port of San Francisco for four months because the U.S. government no longer recognized him as a citizen. Released on bail, Wong and his attorneys from the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association successfully argued his case to the nation’s highest court.

What rights do undocumented immigrants have in the U.S.? In preparation for President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, immigration attorneys are reminding the immigrant community of their constitutional rights. “His fight has benefited hundreds of thousands of people — everybody who can say with certainty: ‘I’m born here, I’m a U.S. citizen,’” said John Trasviña, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement legal adviser and former dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law.

As President-elect Donald Trump vows to end birthright citizenship through executive action, 126 years after Wong was recognized as a U.S. citizen, the question of who counts as “real Americans” is again being put to the test.

Path to recognition

Wong was born at 751 Sacramento St. in San Francisco, in a bedroom above his father’s grocery. His year of birth was either 1873 or 1870, depending on records.

His parents returned to China in 1877, likely driven by a deadly three-day pogrom in which Irish rioters robbed Chinese-owned laundries, set Chinatown buildings on fire and killed four Chinese men, according to a 2021 article for the American Scholar by University of Virginia immigration law professor Amanda Frost, an expert on Wong’s case.

Wong went with them, but returned to the U.S. at the age of 10 in the care of an uncle, eventually becoming a cook in Chinatown.

In 1890, Wong visited China to get married. He was readmitted to the U.S. on the grounds that he was a citizen.

In 1894, he sailed again to Taishan, in the southeastern province of Guangdong, to see his wife and meet his first son, both of whom likely could not immigrate to the U.S. due to the exclusionary laws of the time. Before his departure, he obtained a notarized statement attesting to his American birth and his right to return to the U.S. after his trip.

But when he returned by steamship in 1895, he was prevented from entering under the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited Chinese laborers from immigrating to the U.S.

The Solicitor General of the United States at the time, a former Confederate soldier named Holmes Conrad, decided to use Wong as a legal test case with the hope of overturning birthright citizenship, Frost told the Chronicle.

By the late 19th century, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, also known as the Six Companies, was a force in civil disobedience and litigation. It kept attorney Thomas Riordan on retainer to contest anti-Chinese laws and practices.

“They were like the NAACP before there was an NAACP,” Frost said.

When the CCBA needed money for lawsuits, it would tax its members through an extensive community and business network of district associations that helped new immigrants, said David Lei, a Chinese Historical Society of America board member and San Francisco historian.

Lei described the CCBA as the “GoFundMe of the 19th and 20th century.”

In 1891, Chinese immigrants were the only ethnicity allowed to seek judicial reviews of their denied admissions into the country, historian Lucy Salyer wrote in a book titled “Laws as Harsh as Tigers.” Northern California Chinese immigrants put that fact to use, Salyer wrote, and hired the best legal talent, paying an attorney $75 to $100 per immigration case, about $2,600 to $3,500 today.

In 1892, the CCBA successfully convinced 85,000 Chinese immigrants across the U.S. to refuse to carry the identity cards that proved they were legally in the U.S., in violation of an 1892 federal law called the Geary Act, risking deportation. The CCBA raised funds to hire a team of lawyers to appeal a deportation order for three Chinese immigrants and, in so doing, challenge the Geary Act.

The Supreme Court upheld the act in 1893, but the CCBA’s effort was not a total failure. Due to widespread noncompliance, lack of funding and pressure from the CCBA, the federal government stopped enforcing the identity card requirement, a 1995 paper by now-University of Michigan law professor Ellen Katz stated.

When Wong was barred from entering the U.S., Riordan, Maxwell Evarts and former U.S. Assistant Attorney General J. Hubley Ashton represented him, paid by the CCBA.

“The Chinese never skimped on the best lawyer to protect Wong Kim Ark, all Chinese and all immigrants to redefine birthright citizenship or to define once and for all what it should be,” Lei said.

Trump’s planned salvo is not without precedent.

His campaign website states he plans to direct federal agencies to require at least one parent be a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident for their children to become automatic U.S. citizens, a move that could be litigated up to the Supreme Court. Republican members of Congress have introduced unsuccessful legislation with similar goals in each of the past three decades.

Neither presidential nor congressional action can override constitutional rights — only constitutional amendments or a legal reinterpretation could.

Trasviña said that a lower court would be reluctant to overturn the more than century-old precedent set by the Wong Kim Ark case of recognizing constitutional birthright citizenship in the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court, on the other hand, does not have to follow precedent to the same degree, he said.

“They have to have a strong reason to upset precedent, but they can,” said Trasviña, just as the court’s conservative majority did in 2022 when it overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision affirming a constitutional right to abortion.

He fought back

Just as birthright citizenship is under fire today, in 1898, the Wong Kim Ark decision was similarly met with chagrin from some in American society, including the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle.

“Here is a very broad generalization, which, it is to be feared, may apply to Indians as well as Chinese,” the March 30, 1898, editorial stated. It concluded, “So long as the state can protect its ballot box, it is safe from the more unpleasant features of Chinese and Indian citizenship, though it may become necessary for other reasons to amend the Federal Constitution and definitely limit citizenship to whites and blacks.”

And Wong’s immigration troubles were far from over.

Frost discovered and wrote in 2021 that in 1901, Wong was detained at the border in El Paso, Texas, on a trip back from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Immigration officials disregarded his citizenship claim, barred him from entering the U.S. under the Chinese Exclusion Act and tried to deport him. It took four months for a judge to rule, again, that Wong was indeed a U.S. citizen.

Meanwhile, Wong’s eldest son, despite his best attempts, never made it into the country, Frost said. He was turned away at Angel Island and deported to China in 1911. Even though as the son of a U.S. citizen, he automatically should have been one, Frost said, immigration officials did not believe his claim to be Wong’s son.

Wong’s third son, Yook Jim, was luckier, Frost said. He came to the U.S. at age 11 in 1926 from China and was admitted after a three-week detention on Angel Island.

Yook Jim, who went on to serve in the U.S. Navy in World War II and came to be known as James Y. Wong, was Norman Wong’s father.

Norman went on to advocate for Asian American studies as a UC Berkeley student in the late 1960s and early ’70s, and became a carpenter, a father of two daughters and grandfather to three girls. Not until the 1980s did his father learn about Wong Kim Ark’s monumental role in American history, when a Sacramento Bee reporter came to his house. Yook Jim showed Norman the resulting article.

Norman has wondered whether his father might have actually been Wong Kim Ark’s grandson, even though Frost found documentation attesting that Yook Jim was Wong Kim Ark’s third “true son.” The doubt is a relic of the imperfect record-keeping and the immigrant ingenuity of the time: To circumvent discriminatory immigration laws, many Chinese immigrants were “paper sons,” fabricating ties to unrelated men to come to the U.S.

Even with those doubts, Norman says he has inherited something lasting.

“I think the fact that my grandfather gave me a legacy to be proud of, I’ll take it,” he said. “That legacy is that somebody in my family did something for everybody. He fought back.”

Reach Ko Lyn Cheang: KoLyn.Cheang@sfchronicle.com