Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Bid to End Birthright Citizenship

The Supreme Court dealt a significant setback to President Donald Trump’s bid to eliminate birthright citizenship, rejecting a central piece of the administration’s broader effort to reshape who is automatically recognized as American.

In a landmark 6-3 ruling, the justices blocked Trump’s move and described the effort as plainly at odds with the Constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservatives Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority in ruling against the president.

At the heart of the case was the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War to secure citizenship for formerly enslaved people. Over time, that guarantee has been understood to cover virtually everyone born on U.S. soil or in its territories.

The decision carries major practical consequences, affecting an estimated 150,000 children born in the United States each year to parents who are not citizens.

For Trump, the ruling marks another major loss before the nation’s highest court. It follows several other high-profile defeats, including decisions invalidating his broad tariff program and blocking his attempt to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve’s board of governors.

Trump had sought to end birthright citizenship through an executive order signed on Inauguration Day in 2025. Lower courts quickly moved against the order, finding it unconstitutional before the dispute reached the Supreme Court.

Writing for the majority, Roberts emphasized the meaning of citizenship in sweeping terms. “Citizenship, then and now,” he wrote, “was the right to have rights… to freely participate in our political community.”

Roberts added that the framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” He concluded: “We keep that promise today.”

Roberts was joined by Trump-appointed Amy Coney Barrett and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority. 

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority in part but dissented in part. He did not agree that Trump’s order was unlawful, but rather that he couldn’t take unilateral action without congressional approval.

The stakes in the case were momentous, and put Supreme Court precedent on a collision course with the expansion of executive power. 

The President made history in April by becoming the first sitting president to attend Supreme Court oral arguments in person – a sign of how important the case was to him.

But as he stared down the Justices in the face, including those he appointed himself, they expressed skepticism.

The Supreme Court’s longest-serving conservative, Clarence Thomas, did not hold his fire in a 92-page fiery dissent, which was joined by Trump-appointed Justice Neil Gorsuch. ‘I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time,’ he said.

Thomas argued that the majority had ‘repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights,’ which he said did not align with the text of the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause. 

‘The Citizenship Clause ‘added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship,” Thomas continued, adding that the majority opinion, in his view, ‘devalues that citizenship.’

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito penned another blistering dissent, arguing that the majority, in his view, made a ‘serious mistake,’ and said the ruling ‘preserves a powerful incentive to enter or remain in this country illegally.’

Trump has not shied away from criticizing the Supreme Court for blocking his key policy priorities in his second White House term, and has accused his own conservative nominees on the court of being ‘disloyal.’

‘They were appointed by me, and yet have hurt our Country so badly!’ Trump declared on Truth Social in wake of the tariff ruling, adding later that ‘certain ‘Republican’ Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad.’

The case hinged on narrowly interpreting the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship clause: ‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.’ 

The President’s legal team argued that the children were not ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the US when they were born. 

They claimed that ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ means full allegiance to the US, and parents unlawfully in the US do not qualify, and neither should their children.

Senior Trump administration officials viewed the executive order as a key component of Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda— an issue that has become a defining feature of his second White House term. 

Opponents had argued that a ruling in Trump’s favor would have upended long-held notions of citizenship, and would yield immediate, operational consequences for infants born in the US, putting the impetus on Congress, and the administration, to immediately clarify the status of the newborns.

After Trump signed the citizenship executive action in February 2025, the directive was immediately challenged by states and civil rights groups, including the ACLU. The order has never taken full effect. 

The case, Trump v Barbara, pitted Trump’s order against a group of affected families nationwide, backed by the ACLU and other groups. These groups contended that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, and has been read that way for more than a century – and upheld in laws passed by Congress in the decades since.

Many of the Justices seemed skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments during the April 1 oral arguments. The 6-3 majority was a slimmer outcome than many court-watchers had expected, but was hailed by immigration advocates and lawyers for plaintiffs nonetheless.  

In what proved to be a telling exchange, Chief Justice John Roberts told US Solicitor General John Sauer at the outset of oral arguments that he viewed a key argument from the Trump administration as ‘quirky.’

Roberts noted he was having a hard time making sense of the Trump administration’s legal position on the 14th Amendment’s exceptions to birthright citizenship, citing exceptions the administration listed, including children of ambassadors, children born on warships, and other very limited groups.

‘I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples,’ Roberts noted.

‘We’re in a new world now,’ Sauer told Roberts.

‘It’s a new world,’ Roberts said in response, ‘but it’s the same Constitution.’

Trump’s own nominees— Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch— also appeared skeptical of the administration’s arguments in April.

Justice Kavanaugh cited the passage of the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), noting that it essentially mirrors the text of the 14th Amendment and text of the 1898 case.

‘One might have expected Congress to use a different phrase if it wanted to try to disagree with [precedent set in] on what the scope of birthright citizenship, or the scope of citizenship, should be,’ Kavanaugh said.

‘I am not seeing the relevance as a legal constitutional interpretative matter,’ Kavanaugh finally told Sauer, after a brief back-and-forth.