"Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship, Rejects Trump's Executive Order"
The Supreme Court today delivered a decisive 6–3 ruling upholding birthright citizenship, squarely rejecting President Trump's executive order that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that the plain text of the Fourteenth Amendment — "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States" — guarantees citizenship to virtually every child born on American soil. The opinion drew heavily on the 1898 precedent of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the Court first established that a child born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents is a citizen.
Trump had signed the executive order on the first day of his second term, arguing that the post-Civil War amendment was intended only to grant citizenship to formerly enslaved people, not to extend broadly. Not a single federal judge who reviewed the order let it take effect; one described it as "blatantly unconstitutional."
In Tuesday's decision, Roberts emphasized that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose broad language. "The men who wrote the amendment defined citizenship in expansive terms on purpose," he wrote, "rejecting the views of those who wanted to limit it."
The three dissenting justices were Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito.
The ruling arrives on the final day of the Court's term, alongside several other high-profile decisions. The decision means that the status quo that has stood for 160 years — and been explicitly codified by Congress — remains intact: any child born in the United States is an American citizen at birth, regardless of their parents' immigration status.