U.S Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Bid To End Birthright Citizenship

The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally, holding that such children remain citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The ruling deals a major defeat to one of Trump’s signature immigration policies, an order he signed on the first day of his second term in January 2025 and had campaigned against for more than a decade.

The order had never taken effect, having been struck down by every federal court that considered a challenge to it since it was signed.

The case, Trump v. Barbara, stemmed from a class action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, on behalf of families whose children’s citizenship had been thrown into doubt by the order.

The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, guarantees citizenship to “all persons born… in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The provision was adopted to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which had denied citizenship to people of African descent.

The Trump administration had argued that children born to parents who are undocumented or in the country temporarily are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the full legal sense, and are therefore not entitled to automatic citizenship.

That argument echoed a legal theory rejected by the Supreme Court in its landmark 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that virtually all children born on American soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status, aside from narrow exceptions such as children of foreign diplomats.

During oral arguments in April, which Trump attended in person, several of the court’s conservative justices expressed scepticism toward the administration’s position.

Chief Justice John Roberts described the government’s reasoning as “quirky,” remarking at one point that “it’s a new world, but it’s the same Constitution.”

Tuesday’s decision affirms more than a century of legal precedent and ensures that children born in the United States to undocumented or temporarily present immigrant parents will continue to receive automatic citizenship, along with the rights to a Social Security number, passport and other benefits that accompany it.