Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order, Reaffirming 14th Amendment Protection

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship, ruling 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.

The decision in Trump v. Barbara blocks Executive Order No. 14160, which Trump signed on Jan. 20, 2025. The order directed federal agencies to deny recognition of citizenship to children born in the United States unless at least one parent was a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. Several parents challenged the order on behalf of their children, arguing that it violated both the Fourteenth Amendment and the Immigration and Nationality Act. A federal district court agreed, certified a nationwide class of affected children and barred enforcement of the order. The Supreme Court affirmed that result.

The ruling was 6-3 in the judgment, though only five justices joined Chief Justice John Roberts’s constitutional analysis. Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that Trump’s order could not stand, but said the Court should have resolved the case under federal immigration law rather than the Constitution. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

At the center of the case was the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which grants citizenship to persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The Trump administration argued that children born to undocumented immigrants or temporary visitors were not fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because their parents lacked permanent allegiance to the country. The Court rejected that reading.

Roberts’s opinion traced birthright citizenship through English common law, early American law, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The Court said the common-law rule of citizenship by birthplace, known as jus soli, crossed the Atlantic and became part of American law. Under that rule, nearly everyone born within a sovereign’s territory owed allegiance to that sovereign and received protection in return, with narrow exceptions for children of foreign diplomats, enemy occupying forces, and certain tribal-sovereignty contexts.

The Court said the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted against the backdrop of the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Reconstruction-era lawmakers, Roberts wrote, used the Citizenship Clause to reject that racial and hereditary understanding of citizenship and restore a rule tied to birth on American soil and subjection to American law.

The administration’s principal legal argument focused on domicile. It contended that a child born in the United States is not automatically a citizen unless the parents have a lawful, permanent home here. The Court rejected that theory, finding little historical support for the claim that domicile became a constitutional requirement for citizenship at birth. Roberts wrote that the government’s interpretation relied on a revisionist account of allegiance and would add limits not found in the constitutional text.

The opinion emphasized that the words used repeatedly in Trump’s executive order, including references to a child’s mother, father, lawful status and temporary presence, do not appear in the Citizenship Clause. For the Court, that omission mattered. The Clause focuses on the child’s birth in the United States and subjection to U.S. jurisdiction, not the immigration status of either parent.

Roberts also relied heavily on United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case involving a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were barred from naturalizing under federal law at the time. The Court said Wong Kim Ark confirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment adopted the common-law rule of citizenship by birth, and that later decisions had consistently understood that precedent to protect children born in the United States and subject to its power.

The majority rejected attempts to narrow Wong Kim Ark based on the fact that Wong’s parents were domiciled in the United States. Roberts wrote that the reasoning of the 1898 decision could not be squared with a domicile requirement because the earlier Court had examined the text and history of the Citizenship Clause without finding that the Fourteenth Amendment’s framers imposed such a limit.

Justice Jackson, joined in part by Justice Sotomayor, wrote separately to stress the Reconstruction history behind the Fourteenth Amendment. She said the government and dissenters framed the amendment too narrowly by treating it as a measure only for formerly enslaved people, rather than as a broader constitutional guarantee against caste and inherited exclusion. In her view, the Citizenship Clause rejects the idea that bloodline can determine who belongs at birth.

Kavanaugh agreed that the executive order was unlawful, but on narrower grounds. He said the order conflicted with 8 U.S.C. § 1401(a), the federal statute providing citizenship at birth for persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. Because Congress used language that mirrored the Fourteenth Amendment and had long been understood to incorporate Wong Kim Ark, Kavanaugh said the president could not create new exceptions by executive order. In his view, Congress would have to pass new legislation before such limits could be imposed by statute.

The dissenters took sharply different views of the Citizenship Clause. Thomas argued that the majority misread the historical record and that citizenship at birth was tied to domicile, not mere birth on U.S. soil. He also faulted the Court for upholding broad classwide relief and said the executive order was not facially unconstitutional because some applications, in his view, could be valid.

Alito wrote that the majority’s interpretation improperly grants citizenship to virtually anyone born in the United States, including children of so-called birth tourists. Gorsuch, in a separate dissent, agreed with Thomas that the better reading of the Citizenship Clause turns on whether a child’s parents made the United States their permanent home.

The decision marks a major defeat for one of Trump’s most closely watched immigration policies. It also resolves the constitutional question left open by earlier litigation over the same order: whether a president can redefine birthright citizenship through executive action. The Court’s answer was no. Under Tuesday’s ruling, children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or temporarily present remain citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment.