Washington D.C. — The US Supreme Court delivered a major blow to President Donald Trump’s agenda on ending unconditional birthright citizenship on Tuesday, ruling 5-4 that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment and dissented in part, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.The ruling leaves intact the long-standing Citizenship Clause and strikes down Trump’s Executive Order 14160, which sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States if their mother was in the country unlawfully and the father was neither a US citizen nor lawful permanent resident. Trump’s order would also apply if the mother was lawfully but only temporarily present and the father likewise lacked US citizenship or permanent resident status..The decision marks one of the most significant constitutional rulings of Trump’s second presidency. Roberts wrote that the Constitution’s text leaves little room for the distinctions created by the executive order.“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,” Roberts wrote.He added: “Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”The chief justice also rejected the administration’s attempt to read immigration-status requirements into the Constitution.“Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’—are absent from the Clause,” Roberts wrote.The majority grounded its reasoning in centuries of legal history, tracing the origins of birthright citizenship to English common law’s doctrine of jus soli, under which citizenship generally followed the place of birth rather than the status of one’s parents.Roberts wrote that Congress embraced that understanding in the Civil Rights Act of 1866 following the Civil War before constitutionalizing it through the Fourteenth Amendment, which was adopted to overturn the Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. That ruling had denied citizenship to Black Americans and their descendants.The opinion also relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was an American citizen despite federal laws restricting Chinese immigration.The ruling also represented a notable split among the court’s conservative members.Barrett was the only justice appointed by Trump to join the majority striking down his executive order. Roberts, appointed by former president George W. Bush, was the only Republican-appointed justice besides Barrett to vote against the administration.Thomas, writing the principal dissent, argued that the majority had stretched the historical meaning of the Constitution beyond its original understanding.He maintained that the Citizenship Clause was never intended to automatically extend citizenship to children whose parents were unlawfully or only temporarily present in the US and argued the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” historically required a more complete political allegiance than mere physical presence.Thomas concluded that the majority had improperly expanded constitutional citizenship and said he would have upheld Executive Order 14160. The ruling effectively preserves the constitutional rule that has governed birthright citizenship in the US for more than 125 years and continues to allow for children born on American soil, regardless of the status of their parents, continue to acquire US citizenship automatically at birth.
