Supreme Court rejects Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship
Washington, D.C. – The US Supreme Court has refused to hear President Donald Trump’s bid to limit birthright citizenship, saying his executive order contradicts the longstanding constitutional interpretation of the 14th Amendment.
The court’s 6-3 ruling upheld lower court decisions that blocked Trump’s executive order, which would deny automatic US citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are in the country without legal status or on certain temporary visas.
In a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court traced the legal thread of birthright citizenship from English common law to the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898.
Roberts wrote that the Trump administration and dissenting justices hadn’t provided enough historical evidence to support a rethinking of the Citizenship Clause. >"The trouble is there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view," Roberts wrote.
He said the framers of the 14th Amendment gave citizenship protections to “every free-born person in this land" and said, “We keep that promise today.”
Roberts was joined by conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
After the ruling, Trump denounced the decision as “too bad for our country" and urged Republicans in Congress to pursue legislation to restrict birthright citizenship.
But legal experts have long argued that changing birthright citizenship would probably require a constitutional amendment, not an ordinary piece of legislation.
Constitutional debate The Trump administration argued the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause only applies to children born to US citizens or legal permanent residents. The government’s lawyers said the amendment was mainly intended to guarantee citizenship for former slaves after the Civil War and was not meant to apply to all children born on U.S. soil.
They also said that the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in *United States v. Wong Kim Ark* has been interpreted too broadly for over a century.
The administration’s case rested on historical understandings of terms like “subject to the jurisdiction thereof", “natural allegiance” and “permanently domiciled".
Roberts rejected those arguments, noting that Congress has had many opportunities to change the standards for citizenship, including when it passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, but has not. “If Congress intended to tie citizenship to each individual’s domicile… one would expect to see at least some discussion of the matter,” Roberts wrote.
Concurring and dissenting opinions
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote separately to argue that the framers intentionally used broad constitutional language that embodied universal principles, not protections for people formerly enslaved. “Such universalist appeals were a conscious choice,” Jackson wrote, adding that those principles were already part and parcel of the nation’s constitutional identity.
Justice Clarence Thomas, in dissent, said the majority’s historical analysis was wrong and that the Citizenship Clause had been stretched beyond its original meaning.
"The Court today takes the extraordinary step of declaring facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens," Thomas wrote.
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch also dissented.
In a separate opinion, Kavanaugh wrote that Congress has the power to create a statutory exception to birthright citizenship but said it has not done so.
General immigration implications
The ruling is a major blow to Trump's wider immigration agenda, which has sought to restrict legal immigration routes and enhance executive authority over immigration enforcement.
In recent months, the Supreme Court has handed down several rulings that sided with the administration on immigration issues, including rulings regarding Temporary Protected Status and asylum policy.
Civil rights groups praised Tuesday’s decision.
The ruling reaffirmed a fundamental constitutional guarantee, said American Civil Liberties Union attorney Cecillia Wang, who argued the case before the Supreme Court. “If you are born here, you are a citizen,” Wang said.
The ACLU and other advocacy groups said the elimination of birthright citizenship would result in a massive population of children born in the United States who are not citizens, placing huge burdens on families and government agencies.
A report by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State University predicted Trump’s plan would deny US citizenship to some 255,000 children born each year and swell the number of undocumented residents by 2.7 million by 2045.
Such a policy could create “a self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass", the study warned, as legal uncertainty would be passed down from generation to generation.
