US Supreme Court rules against Trump order to end birthright citizenship

Washington, DC – The United States Supreme Court has ruled against US President Donald Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship for all individuals born on US soil.

The 6-3 ruling represents a major blow to Trump and his effort to transform immigration in the US. Upon taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump had signed an executive order seeking to bar those born in the US to parents on temporary legal statuses or without documentation from automatically receiving US citizenship.

The nine-panel Supreme Court’s ruling upholds a lower court’s determination that Trump’s order ran counter to the US constitution, as well as a subsequent Supreme Court decision on the matter.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the US practice of birthright citizenship to English common law, through the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in the United States v Wong Kim Ark.

In his 26-page opinion, he said Trump administration lawyers and dissenting Supreme Court justices had offered insufficient evidence in its reinterpretation of longstanding law.

“The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view,” he wrote.

“The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,” he wrote. “We keep that promise today.”

Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as all of the liberals on the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.

Trump did not immediately respond to the ruling, but earlier in the day he posted an article on his Truth Social arguing Congress could pass legislation changing birthright citizenship, although there is little evidence there would be anything close to the political will among lawmakers to do so.

‘Already core to the Nation’s identity’

Lawyers for the Trump administration had argued that the Constitution’s 14th amendment, which grants citizenship to those born in the US and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, only applies to infants whose parents are US citizens or permanent residents.

They argued that the 14th amendment had been narrowly written to apply to newly freed slaves, and was never envisioned to include all individuals born in the US.

They further argued that United States v Wong Kim Ark, a Supreme Court ruling which established the citizenship of a man born on US soil to Chinese national parents in the late 1800s, did not affirm the current practice of birthright citizenship, as has for decades been the interpretation.

Their argument largely hinged on the definition of the terms “subject to the jurisdiction of”, “natural allegiance” and “permanently domiciled”.

In his opinion, Roberts noted that Congress has had ample opportunity to define those terms to limit birthright citizenship, notably when drafting the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

“If Congress intended to hinge citizenship on each individual’s domicile—a question that ‘is sometimes a matter of great difficulty to decide’…it is reasonable to expect there would have been at least some discussion of the topic,” he wrote.

In a concurring opinion, Ketanji Brown Jackson took aim at the assertion that the 14th Amendment was meant only to apply to freed slaves, instead arguing its language reflects principles that were already longstanding in US culture and law.

“Such universalist appeals were a conscious choice. Yes, Black Americans had suffered a singular wrong. And yes,
they had ‘fought and bled’ for the Union, paying a steep price for their freedom,” she wrote.

“But the delegates did not rest on these laurels. Rather, they drew upon the moral and political force of the universal principles that were already core to the Nation’s identity.”

In his dissenting opinion, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas argued the majority’s account was “not historically accurate”, saying that the 14th amendment had been “repurposed for political projects”.

“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” he wrote.

“Because many potential applications of the President’s Order are consistent with the original public meaning of the Citizenship Clause, I respectfully dissent,” he said.

Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch also authored dissenting opinions. Kavanaugh, despite joining the majority’s opinion, wrote that he did not believe Trump’s executive violated the US constitution, but that it ran counter to the Immigration and the Nationality Act.

He wrote Congress could amend or enact “new legislation establishing exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to foreign citizens
unlawfully or temporarily in the country”.

“But Congress has not yet done so,” he wrote.

‘Self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass’

Tuesday’s ruling represents a major blow to Trump in his effort to Trump’s executive order comes amid a broad effort to overhaul nearly all forms of immigration in the US.

The court had previously handed the president several immigration victories in recent weeks, including allowing him to effectively do away with special legal status for residents of some crisis-hit countries, called Temporary Protected Status, and the employ a controversial tactic of physically blocking asylum seekers from stepping on US soil, where the government is legally obligated to allow them to apply for protection.

Underscoring the significance of the case, Trump in early April attended oral arguments in the case, making him the first sitting president to do so for an active case before the Supreme Court.

Rights groups hailed the court’s decision. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen who argued the challenge at the Supreme Court, said the decision “reaffirms a fundamental American promise — if you are born here, you are a citizen”.

The ACLU and other groups had warned a ruling in favour of Trump would have wide-ranging implications, effectively creating a new stateless class in the US while snarling a bureaucratic system ill prepared to deal with such a fundamental change.

“Our brave clients and our legal team stand with millions of people around our country who spoke up for one of our most cherished rights,” she said. “The Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship stands strong.”

A Migration Policy Institute-Penn State study released in May of last year said an estimated 255,000 infants a year would be born in the US without citizenship under the order, increasing the undocumented population by 2.7 million by 2045.

It warned that the order “would create a self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass – with US-born residents inheriting the social disadvantage borne by their parents and even, over time, their grandparents and great-grandparents”.