THE United States Supreme Court has ruled against US President Donald Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship for all individuals born in the US.
The 6-3 ruling represents a major blow to Trump and his efforts to transform US immigration policy. Upon taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump signed an executive order seeking to bar those born in the US to parents on temporary legal statuses or without documentation from automatically receiving US citizenship.
The nine-panel Supreme Court’s ruling upholds a lower court’s determination that Trump’s order ran counter to the US Constitution, as well as a subsequent Supreme Court decision on the matter.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the US practice of birthright citizenship to English common law, through the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in the United States v Wong Kim Ark.
In his 26-page opinion, he said Trump administration lawyers and dissenting Supreme Court justices had offered insufficient evidence in their reinterpretation of longstanding law.
“The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view,” he wrote.
“The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,” he wrote. “We keep that promise today.”
Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, as well as all of the liberals on the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Trump, meanwhile, called the ruling “too bad for our country” and appealed to Republicans in Congress to pass legislation constricting birthright citizenship. That will likely prove an uphill battle, with public opinion polls regularly suggesting strong public support for the practice and the Supreme Court’s majority opinion suggesting a constitutional amendment would be required.
“Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship,” Trump wrote. “They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
Lawyers for the Trump administration had argued that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to those born in the US and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”, only applies to infants whose parents are US citizens or permanent residents.
They argued that the 14th Amendment had been narrowly written to apply to newly freed slaves, and was never envisioned to include all individuals born in the US.
They further argued that United States v Wong Kim Ark, a Supreme Court ruling that established the citizenship of a man born on US soil to Chinese national parents in the late 1800s, did not affirm the current practice of birthright citizenship, as has been the interpretation for decades.
Their argument largely hinged on the definition of the terms “subject to the jurisdiction of”, “natural allegiance” and “permanently domiciled”.
In his opinion, Roberts noted that Congress has had ample opportunity to define those terms to limit birthright citizenship, notably when drafting the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.
“If Congress intended to hinge citizenship on each individual’s domicile—a question that ‘is sometimes a matter of great difficulty to decide’ … it is reasonable to expect there would have been at least some discussion of the topic,” he wrote.
In a concurring opinion, Ketanji Brown Jackson took aim at the assertion that the 14th Amendment was meant only to apply to freed slaves, instead arguing its language reflects principles that were already longstanding in US culture and law.
“Such universalist appeals were a conscious choice. Yes, Black Americans had suffered a singular wrong. And yes, they had ‘fought and bled’ for the Union, paying a steep price for their freedom,” she wrote.