US Supreme Court strikes down Trump's birthright citizenship order, upholding 14th Amendment

A sharply divided US Supreme Court has struck down President Donald Trump's executive order limiting birthright citizenship, reaffirming that the 14th Amendment extends citizenship to virtually everyone born on American soil. The 6-3 ruling, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, halts a signature immigration policy of the Trump administration before it ever took effect.

The majority opinion

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts grounded the decision in the history of the 14th Amendment. The provision was enacted after the Civil War to settle the citizenship status of former slaves born in the United States.

Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights -- to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land.'

Roberts added that the court was simply keeping that promise today. The ruling drew support from the three liberal justices and three of the court's conservatives, including Roberts himself.

A directive that never went into effect

Trump signed the executive order, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," on the first day of his second term, 20 January 2025. It instructed agencies not to recognize as citizens children born to parents who were neither US citizens nor lawful permanent residents. A federal judge in Seattle blocked the order on 23 January, and it remained frozen through the lower-court litigation. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case, and Tuesday's decision closes that legal battle without the administration ever having implemented the overhaul.

Tense oral arguments

During oral arguments attended by Trump himself, the first sitting president to appear at the court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer faced skeptical questioning. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed on the practicalities of determining citizenship status at birth.

Is this happening in the delivery room?

Chief Justice Roberts challenged Sauer's reliance on narrow exceptions to citizenship to build a sweeping argument, calling the examples "tiny and sort of idiosyncratic." Justice Clarence Thomas was seen as the justice most likely to side with the administration.

Trump's long fixation with birthright citizenship

Trump has made ending birthright citizenship a centerpiece of his immigration agenda since his 2015 campaign, when he called it "the biggest magnet for illegal immigration." Weeks before the ruling, he said on social media that the US could not live with the "shackles" of birthright citizenship, adding that no other notable country maintained such a practice.

This is not sustainable economically or otherwise, and no notable country in the world maintains this practice.

The ruling is the latest in a string of judicial setbacks for Trump's executive actions. He has previously fumed at the Supreme Court for blocking his goals on issues such as tariffs.

Timeline of the birthright citizenship battle

The court issued the decision on the final day of its term, a session marked by other high-profile rulings on transgender athletes and campaign finance. Civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups immediately welcomed the outcome. Derrick Johnson, president of the NAACP, hailed the ruling, while legal scholars pointed to the deep roots of birthright citizenship in the Americas, tracing the practice back more than 500 years to European colonial powers eager to encourage settlement.