The Supreme Court has rejected President Trump's executive order targeting birthright citizenship, affirming that children born in the United States to undocumented or temporarily present parents are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, plus conservative Amy Coney Barrett. The ruling spans 194 pages, with Justice Clarence Thomas contributing a 90-page dissent. Conservative justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch also objected in part or in full.
Trump signed the executive order on his first day back in office, seeking to reinterpret the Constitution's citizenship clause to exclude children born to non-citizens or those on temporary visas. The administration claimed it would begin affecting how citizenship is granted on February 19, 2025, potentially impacting hundreds of thousands of infants annually.
The order immediately faced legal challenges from Democratic state attorneys general and the American Civil Liberties Union. During April oral arguments in Trump v Barbara, the class action case brought by affected parents, the ACLU's Cecillia Wang told justices that birthright citizenship represents America's core understanding of citizenship.
"The 14th amendment's fixed bright line rule has contributed to the growth and thriving of our nation," Wang argued. "It comes from text and history. It is workable and it prevents manipulation."
The Trump administration's solicitor general, D John Sauer, pushed a different interpretation. He argued that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" should exclude babies born to parents lacking permanent residence or legal domicile in the country. Sauer called unrestricted birthright citizenship "contrary to the practice of the overwhelming majority of modern nations" and claimed it diminishes the value of citizenship.
The administration built its case on the concept of domicile, a term not appearing in the Fourteenth Amendment itself. Sauer contended that only those with permanent residence could grant citizenship to their children. He drew parallels to the formerly enslaved people the amendment was designed to protect, arguing they possessed domicile while undocumented immigrants do not.
But the justices signaled skepticism during oral arguments. Chief Justice Roberts at one point called part of the government's argument "very quirky." Justice Elena Kagan said the administration was relying on "pretty obscure sources" to construct its case.
In the decision, Roberts wrote that the Court "exhaustively canvassed the text and history of the Citizenship Clause and at no point identified any evidence that the ratifiers thought themselves to be imposing a domicile limitation."
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, explicitly grants citizenship to "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof." It was designed to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had declared that Black people were not citizens but "a separate class of persons."
The seminal birthright citizenship case, United States v Wong Kim Ark, had established that children born to immigrant parents with permanent residence gain citizenship at birth. The Trump administration attempted to revive the domicile requirement as a limiting principle, but found no constitutional basis for it in the historical record.
Efforts to overturn birthright citizenship have gained traction among conservative circles in recent years, though most legal scholars maintain the amendment has been correctly interpreted for over a century. The administration's arguments drew from legal theories developed by white supremacists in the late 1800s, according to reporting. John Eastman, a lawyer disbarred in California after his work attempting to overturn the 2020 election, has also championed the push to end birthright citizenship.
Author James Rodriguez: "This isn't even close to settled politically, and Trump's team will likely find new angles to press the issue, but the Court just made clear the Constitution doesn't say what the administration wants it to say."
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