Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship, Handing Trump a Stinging Defeat

A constitutional promise, reaffirmed

The Supreme Court on Tuesday firmly rejected President Trump's effort to restrict birthright citizenship, ruling 6–3 that the Constitution's Fourteenth Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually all children born on U.S. soil.npr Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, tracing the American practice of birthright citizenship from English common law through the Civil War-era amendment's ratification in 1868 and the court's landmark 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark.npr The decision marked the third significant Supreme Court defeat for Trump in recent months, following February's ruling invalidating his sweeping tariffs and Monday's ruling blocking him from immediately firing a Federal Reserve governor.nbcnews

The executive order that never took effect

Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, seeking to deny citizenship to babies born in the U.S. to parents who entered the country illegally or hold only temporary legal status.npr Every federal court that reviewed the order blocked it before it could take effect, with one judge calling it "blatantly unconstitutional."npr The ACLU challenged the order on behalf of individual plaintiffs in a New Hampshire case the Supreme Court agreed to hear in December.nbcnews

Roberts's majority — joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh on the constitutional question — found "scant evidence" for the administration's reinterpretation of a clause that has governed citizenship law for more than 160 years.npr "Citizenship then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community," Roberts wrote. "We keep that promise today."npr

The dissenters and what comes next

Three justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch — would have upheld Trump's order, arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment's phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was designed primarily to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved Black Americans and was never intended to extend to children of foreign visitors.nbcnews The executive order, had it stood, would have stripped an estimated 320,000 children born annually in the United States of automatic citizenship.aljazeera

Trump did not immediately respond to the ruling, though he posted earlier Tuesday that Congress could theoretically pass legislation altering birthright citizenship — a legislative path that faces overwhelming political obstacles.aljazeera The decision closes off the executive route definitively, cementing a constitutional guarantee that has remained intact through a century of intense immigration debates, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, when even children born in detention camps to non-citizen parents were automatically granted citizenship.npr