WASHINGTON, July 1 — The U.S. Supreme Court on June 30 struck down an executive order from President Donald Trump that sought to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born on American soil to parents without lawful permanent status, ruling 6 to 3 that the measure could not stand against the Fourteenth Amendment.
The executive order, signed on Trump’s first day back in office in January 2025, would have withheld birthright citizenship from newborns whose mothers were either unlawfully present or in the United States on temporary visas at the time of birth, when the father was not a citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order had been blocked by multiple lower courts and never took effect. The Justice Department appealed those injunctions to the Supreme Court, which held oral argument in the case in early April.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined in full by four justices and in part by a fifth. Five members of the majority concluded the order violated the Fourteenth Amendment; one concurred on statutory grounds. Two justices appointed by Trump himself, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the majority alongside the court’s three liberal justices. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
In a 26-page opinion, Roberts wrote that the guarantee of birthright citizenship is “the right to have rights” and that the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to “every freeborn person on this soil.” He said the administration’s proposed reinterpretation of the citizenship clause had little support in the historical record and could not override more than a century of judicial and legislative practice. The opinion pointed to the court’s 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a child born on U.S. soil to non-citizen parents was a citizen at birth, as controlling precedent.
Thomas wrote the principal dissent, running to about 91 pages, arguing that the amendment’s authors intended primarily to secure citizenship for freed slaves and their descendants and that the majority’s reading stretched the clause beyond its original scope. Alito, joining Thomas, described the ruling as one of the most consequential in the court’s history and said in his view the majority had erred. Gorsuch filed a separate dissent focused on the amendment’s jurisdiction clause. Kavanaugh, while joining most of the majority opinion, wrote separately to address the limits of executive authority.
The order had faced legal challenge from the start. Twenty-two state attorneys general and a coalition of civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups filed at least five separate suits shortly after it was signed, and Judge John Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington issued a nationwide preliminary injunction on February 6, 2025, halting enforcement. Several other federal district courts followed with parallel rulings.
Trump responded to the decision on his social media platform, calling the outcome “bad for our country” and urging Congress to end birthright citizenship by statute, saying he would give such legislation his full support. Legal scholars noted that any legislative attempt would face its own constitutional test, since the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause is generally read to require a constitutional amendment for changes to its core reach. Attorneys for the plaintiff states welcomed the ruling as an affirmation of long-standing constitutional practice. Advocacy groups representing affected families echoed that view, while opponents of the current interpretation signaled they would continue to press for legislative and administrative changes.
Policy institutes and demographic researchers estimated that around 255,000 children born each year in the United States could have been affected by the redefinition. The decision leaves the current understanding of the citizenship clause intact and closes off, for now, the option of narrowing it through unilateral executive action.
