Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship, Handing Trump a Stinging Defeat
In a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's Day One executive order restricting birthright citizenship, with Chief Justice John Roberts affirming that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to nearly all children born on U.S. soil.
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.[0] 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.[0] 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.npr
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.[0] Every federal court that reviewed the order blocked it before it could take effect, with one judge calling it "blatantly unconstitutional."[0] The ACLU challenged the order on behalf of individual plaintiffs in a New Hampshire case the Supreme Court agreed to hear in December.npr
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.[0] "Citizenship then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community," Roberts wrote. "We keep that promise today."[0]
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.npr The executive order, had it stood, would have stripped an estimated 320,000 children born annually in the United States of automatic citizenship.nbcnews
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.nbcnews 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.[0]