The Supreme Court upheld the Constitution’s guarantee that those born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens, rejecting President Donald Trump’s attempt to rewrite one of the most sacred laws in the U.S.

“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 ruling released Tuesday. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in part. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

Citizenship, according to the chief justice, has been defined as having rights to “freely participate in our political community.”

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

The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside.”

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

Trump, however, issued an executive order in January 2025 asserting that the amendment was never meant to apply to children born to parents living in the U.S. temporarily or illegally. The administration argued the use of the phrase in the 14th Amendment, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” referred only to people who were lawful subjects of America or had what is known as “domicile.” Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued at oral arguments in April that a person can only be considered as “domiciled” in the U.S. if they have permission to legally reside in America. Notably, however, the word “domicile” appears nowhere in the text of the 14th Amendment.

This narrow interpretation was rejected by four federal judges before the question finally came before the Supreme Court. Judges, legal scholars and Constitutional experts alike panned Trump’s executive order, emphasizing how it was entirely against over 100 years of precedent. In 1898’s Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, the high court affirmed that children born in the United States to parents who were not diplomats or foreign officials had the right to citizenship.

“Arguments for limiting birthright citizenship to those domiciled in the United States fail. These arguments err in their definition of ‘allegiance,’ contending that natural allegiance was no longer sufficient for citizenship and that some greater quantum of allegiance (based on domicile) was required,” the majority wrote. “There is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view; sources from 1776 to 1868 defined ‘allegiance by birth’ just as the British did — as ‘the tie or duty’ owed by one who is ‘born within the dominions and under the protection of a particular sovereign.’”

Additionally, if Congress meant to limit U.S. citizenship only to children of people “domiciled” in the U.S., as the Trump administration suggested, “nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design.”

Taking a jab at Trump’s executive order, the opinion noted that words appearing “frequently” in the order, like “mother,” “father,” “lawful,” and “temporary” are completely absent from the citizenship clause.

In their concurrence, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor took time to call out Thomas’ dissenting views on birthright citizenship.

“Despite his longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to ‘freed slaves such as Dred Scott,’” Jackson wrote. “It is for this reason, he says, that ‘children who were born in the United States but [to parents] not domiciled here’ are not entitled to claim birthright citizenship.”

“But that narrow vision of the Fourteenth Amendment bears little relationship to the history of its ratification. Even worse, Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” Jackson wrote.

Dissenting in part, Kavanaugh wrote Tuesday that the “constitutional issue [of birthright citizenship] is not straightforward, much as we may want it to be.”

He argued there were some “exceptions” when Wong Kim Ark was decided, and there also should be some today. Echoing the Trump administration’s goal, Kavanaugh suggested the exceptions should be limited to children born to foreign citizens or people who live in the U.S. unlawfully or temporarily. He also suggested Congress step in to amend the 14th Amendment “or otherwise enact new legislation establishing exceptions” to birthright citizenship.

Thomas, in his dissent, called the majority’s ruling “not historically accurate” and dubbed it an “extraordinary step” that “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

“Together, we sent a clear message: No President can rewrite the Constitution.”

In a statement Tuesday, Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, the group that first brought the lawsuit along with the ACLU and several state ACLU chapters, noted that it was “because of the organized struggle by formerly enslaved Black Americans and San Francisco Chinese immigrants, [that] it has been understood that when you are born here, you are a citizen. That legacy continues today.”

“Together, we sent a clear message: No President can rewrite the Constitution. The administration spent more than a year creating chaos and fear for all families. At a time when Americans needed their government focused on gas prices, groceries, and healthcare, this was a costly distraction,” Kohli said. “Politicians should not be rewriting who belongs and who gets a say in our democracy, and now is the time to use our voices to ensure our country is a place where we all belong.”

Last year, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to mostly block nationwide injunctions that lower courts had put on Trump’s birthright citizenship order. The court’s conservative majority wrote last June that the nationwide injunctions, or court orders that universally restrict or stop a party from acting, were an affront to executive power and that they were too powerful a tool for the judiciary to wield.

While many will celebrate Tuesday’s ruling and rightly consider it a victory for the rule of law, Thomas Wolf, director of democracy initiatives at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said Tuesday the Supreme Court shouldn’t be overly glorified for its decision.

“Today’s ruling is the right one amid an avalanche of Supreme Court opinions undermining our democracy. The Court could not have defensibly ruled any differently,” Wolf said in a statement. “In just the past few weeks alone, the Court further undermined the Voting Rights Act, encouraged more aggressive partisan gerrymandering, dangerously expanded presidential power over federal agencies, and further depleted protections for immigrants. This ruling does not make up for all the damage the Court has done this term.”

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.

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