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The Supreme Court yesterday affirmed the principle that almost everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen, a major decision that rejects a push by President Donald Trump to fundamentally redefine who is American in ways not seen for more than 150 years.
The justices struck down an executive order by the president that said citizenship would not be granted to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or those on temporary visas for work, travel, school or humanitarian reasons.
Trump’s order would have had sweeping political, economic and social ramifications, changing the definition of citizenship in the most significant way since the 14th Amendment guaranteeing citizenship to formerly enslaved people was ratified shortly after the Civil War.
The ruling reaffirms the long-settled understanding that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship on any child born in the United States, with limited exceptions for children of diplomats and other rare cases. The principle was established in a landmark 1898 high court decision that found that Wong Kim Ark, a man born to Chinese immigrants in San Francisco, was a citizen.
The topic has been one of the top priorities in his crackdown on immigration in a case involving a right that had long been woven into the fabric of American society.
A lower court blocked Trump’s executive order directing U.S. agencies not to recognise the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called a “green card” holder.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote the majority opinion for the ideologically mixed group of justices that included the court’s three liberals, as well as conservative Amy Coney Barrett.
Conservative Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented from the 5-4 majority in ruling the executive order violated the 14th Amendment, but he joined the 6-3 majority in finding the order violated federal law.
“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 for the majority. “We keep that promise today.”
The opinion came over the objections of conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Alito wrote a dissent, while Thomas wrote an opinion that Gorsuch joined.
Alito said birthright citizenship acts as a magnet drawing migrants to the United States to give birth so their children could be citizens, echoing an argument the Trump administration has made.
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote. He added later that the ruling “will seriously affect the country’s future.”
Thomas said 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.”
Cecillia Wang, the American Civil Liberty Union’s national legal director, applauded the ruling.
“The court’s decision reaffirms a fundamental American promise — if you are born here, you are a citizen,” Wang said in a statement. “A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat.”
The ruling represents another significant repudiation for Trump on a signature policy before the high court, after the justices this term blocked his tariffs and deployment of National Guard troops to Chicago.
The importance of the case was underscored by Trump’s presence at arguments in April, marking the first time in history a sitting president has attended such a hearing.
Trump lashed out at the Supreme Court after the justices blocked his tariffs in February and kept up his attacks in the months that followed. In an online post on May 10, he criticized two of his nominees by name — Gorsuch and Barrett — for ruling against him in the high-profile case.
“Well, maybe Neil and Amy just had a really bad day, but our Country can only handle so many decisions of that magnitude before it breaks down, and cracks!!!” Trump wrote then on Truth Social. “A negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not Economically sustainable for the United States of America!”
On Tuesday, Trump said in a Truth Social post that it was “too bad for our country” that the high court upheld birthright citizenship and urged Congress to pass legislation outlawing it.
Many legal scholars have said such a change would require a constitutional amendment, but Trump maintained in his post it would not. “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!”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices during arguments in April that granting birthright citizenship to nearly everyone encourages illegal immigration and “birth tourism” — traveling to the U.S. to have a baby so the child can be a U.S. citizen.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer, seen in a courtroom sketch, argues before the Supreme Court on April 1 with President Donald Trump seated behind him. (Dana Verkouteren/AP)
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He also said migrants who take advantage of the United States’ citizenship policy undermine the rule of law.
“We’re in a new world now … where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen,” Sauer said.
Sauer’s legal argument turned on a clause in the 14th Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.
Sauer said “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” invokes a necessary political allegiance to the United States to be a citizen. He said children whose parents lack permanent residency status cannot demonstrate that fealty because they haven’t committed to staying in the country for the long term.
Wang, who argued the case for the ACLU, rejected the government’s contentions, saying the phrase has long been understood to refer to the children of diplomats and others.
ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang, center, and ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, right, outside the Supreme Court building on April 1. (Heather Diehl/Getty Images)
She told the justices in April that the administration’s reading of the 14th Amendment belied its plain meaning, the court’s holding in United States v. Wong Kim Ark and decades of practice by the government.
“The framers of the 14th Amendment meant to have universal law of citizenship subject to narrow exceptions,” Wang said.
A portrait of American Wong Kim Ark in 1904. (Interim Archives/Getty Images)
As one of the first acts of his second term, Trump issued an executive order in January instructing government agencies to stop issuing citizenship documentation to children born to families without permanent immigration status on or after Feb. 19, 2025.
The administration quickly faced multiple lawsuits over the controversial order.
One of the cases made it to the Supreme Court last year. That case did not deal with the merits of Trump’s birthright citizenship order, but instead examined whether lower federal courts could issue nationwide injunctions. The justices ruled for the Trump administration, limiting the orders that have tied up some of his agenda.
After that decision, the ACLU and other immigrants’ rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit in New Hampshire on behalf of families affected by the order. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction in the case, but before an appeals court ruled, administration officials petitioned the Supreme Court to take it up.
About 250,000 children would have been born without citizenship in the U.S. each year under Trump’s order, or roughly 5 million by 2045, according to a friend-of-the-court brief filed by dozens of professors. Some would probably have been left stateless because their parents would be unwilling or unable to obtain citizenship for their children in their homelands.
The professors argued that Trump’s order would create a permanent underclass.
“The creation of this caste would disrupt 150 years of intergenerational upward mobility for immigrants and would reverberate broadly through the U.S. economy and society while failing to address actual causes of migration,” they wrote.
The U.S. is one of about 35 countries that have birthright citizenship. Most nations abide by lineage-based rules that mandate parents be citizens or permanent residents for their children to obtain citizenship.
The case was one of a handful of significant rulings dealing with immigration this term as the Trump administration has ramped up deportations and more broadly sought to limit migrants from entering the country.
The Supreme Court upheld the administration’s cancellation of temporary humanitarian protections preventing the deportation of Haitians and Syrians on Monday and allowed immigration agents to turn aside asylum seekers at the border.
About 1.3 million people from 17 countries are in the U.S. on temporary protected status. The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to end their deportation protections.
The Supreme Court has already allowed the Trump administration to cancel for the time being temporary protected status for about 350,000 Venezuelans while the case plays out in the courts and end a program that allowed about 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to remain in the country while their immigration cases were ongoing.
Norman Wong, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, said in a statement that the ruling reaffirmed what his great-grandfather had fought for more than a century ago.
“Today’s ruling shows that his victory remains as important now as it was in 1898,” Wong said.
