Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Birthright-Citizenship Limits
The president congratulated China on the 'win.'
The Supreme Court decreed Tuesday that President Trump’s 2025 executive order denying birthright citizenship to many children born to parents unlawfully or temporarily in the United States violates the Constitution’s citizenship clause.
The 6-3 decision in Trump v. Barbara reaffirmed the court’s longstanding interpretation that nearly all children born on U.S. soil are American citizens under the 14th Amendment.
Mr. Trump’s executive order “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” would have denied automatic citizenship to children born in the United States unless at least one parent is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
Though issued January 20, 2025, after Mr. Trump was inaugurated for a second term, court challenges blocked the measure from taking effect.
“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,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “We keep that promise today.”
The majority said its 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that nearly everyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of a parent’s nationality or immigration status, settled the citizenship clause’s constitutional meaning more than a century ago. That clause, adopted after the Civil War and ratified in 1868, reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
The amendment was intended in part to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford that people of African descent could not be American citizens.
Mr. Trump, who became the first sitting president to attend Supreme Court oral arguments when he appeared at the April hearing, argued children born to parents in the country illegally or in some cases temporarily are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. The majority rejected that interpretation.
The issue of so-called “anchor babies” — a term critics of birthright citizenship often use — loomed large during the 2024 presidential campaign and beyond. Mr. Trump and his allies said illegal immigration during the Biden administration heightened the importance of revisiting the constitutional question. They also cited cases of women, often from the People’s Republic of China, who traveled to the United States specifically to give birth so their children would acquire U.S. citizenship.
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas said today’s decision “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.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, on the other hand, said Mr. Thomas’ argument “elides the entire point” of amendments enacted during Reconstruction. These, she wrote, “were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch joined Mr. Thomas’s dissent. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a separate concurring opinion agreeing the executive order could not take effect but saying he would resolve the case on narrower grounds than the majority.
Although defeated at the high court, Mr. Trump maintained hope that Congress could narrow birthright citizenship through legislation.
“The Supreme Court upheld Birthright Citizenship, which is too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process,” the president said on social media. “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.”
He later added, “I would like to congratulate President Xi, and the Great Country of China, on their massive Birthright Citizenship WIN!”
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