The Supreme Court decided to protect birthright citizenship in a ruling on Tuesday against President Donald Trump’s effort to redefine who gets to be an American.
In the last decision of the term, the justices kept in place the 14th Amendment right of all people born in the country to be granted U.S. citizenship. It was a major blow for Trump, who launched his second term with an executive order meant to deny U.S. citizenship to babies born to undocumented immigrants and those on temporary visas.
The Supreme Court has OK’d several Trump moves to reshape the country, but his attempt to thwart long-standing precedent to narrow the scope of the 14th Amendment proved a bridge too far, with Chief Justice John Roberts calling it a “dramatically revisionist view” in the court’s opinion in Trump v. Barbara.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have 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,” Roberts wrote.
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A favorable decision for Trump seemed unlikely based on the skepticism the justices displayed during oral arguments in April, a portion of which the president sat in on. No other sitting president has attended Supreme Court oral arguments.
While the 6-3 decision struck down Trump’s executive order, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a partial dissent that Congress could limit birthright citizenship.
Trump urged lawmakers to take up the issue, which he claimed in a Truth Social post wouldn’t need a constitutional amendment.
“Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!” Trump wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a dissent stating that the citizenship clause addressed race, not people temporarily in the country.
“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,” Thomas wrote. “In doing so, the Court 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.”
Thomas’ opinion drew intense criticism from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who highlighted Thomas’ “longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution.”
“JUSTICE THOMAS now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure,” she wrote in a concurring opinion Justice Sonia Sotomayor joined.
Justice Samuel Alito issued a separate dissenting opinion saying this was one of the most important decisions in the court’s history and labeling it a serious mistake.
The justices were unwilling to depart from the long-established interpretation of the 14th Amendment enshrined in the aftermath of the Civil War, ensuring citizenship for formerly enslaved people. The Supreme Court ruled that the constitutional right applied to children of noncitizens in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese parents living in California.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that immigrants without permanent legal status were subject to the jurisdiction of their home countries and not the U.S.
Had the Supreme Court sided with Trump, some people born on American soil in the future would be considered stateless. The mechanics of enforcing such restrictions prompted questioning from Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett.
“I can imagine it being messy,” Barrett said during oral arguments.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who’s led the administration’s hard-line effort to restrict immigration, raged at the court’s decision on X.
“One of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court,” he wrote. “American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans.”
The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of immigrant parents, after the court’s conservative majority last year constrained federal judges from issuing nationwide enforcement blocks on the administration’s actions.
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