The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered the most anticipated decision of the term, one in which justices were called on to weigh in on one of the pillars of a nation forged by immigration: the constitutionally recognized right to automatic citizenship for babies born on U.S. soil to parents who are undocumented or temporarily in the country, whether as tourists or, for example, on a work visa.
The court found, six to three, that President Donald Trump’s executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship was unconstitutional. The conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
The origin of the ruling — which comes shortly after the high court delivered two other decisions backing parts of the administration’s immigration policy — lies in an executive order signed on January 20, 2025 by President Donald Trump on the first day of his return to power. With it, he sought to limit a right that is woven into the fabric of a nation that on July 4, 2026, will mark 250 years of existence. That decision prompted three separate lawsuits, and three federal courts found its implementation unlawful, blocking it from taking effect.
What Trump was trying to do was to eliminate a right recognized for over 150 years in the 14th Amendment. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,” wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the 194-page ruling. “We keep that promise today.”
Resounding though it might be, the rebuke does not come as a surprise. Last April, the Supreme Court heard the parties’ arguments, and the outcome suggested the court was poised to rule against the Trump administration, after having done so earlier regarding its tariff policy. The decision to strike down tariffs was a rare setback for a president who had typically prevailed before the court’s six conservative justices, albeit never more decisively than in July 2024, when they granted him broad immunity for decisions made in the exercise of his duties. That ruling smoothed the path for a return to the White House for a candidate who faced four pending criminal cases.
The birthright citizenship question also featured prominently during the previous term. Then, the Supreme Court considered the government’s request to lift the preliminary injunction issued by those three judges, and the court ruled in Trump’s favor without addressing the merits of the case. It did, however, limit federal judges’ authority to issue nationwide preliminary injunctions against an executive order. The government argues that such practice is unconstitutional and that judges can only enjoin a rule’s application for parties with a specific interest.
With Tuesday’s decision, the matter is settled for now. To underscore what was at stake and to rally his supporters (Trump appointed three of the nine justices during his first term), the president attended the oral argument in April in a move without precedent: no sitting president had ever followed the oral arguments of a case in person. He did not stay for the entire hearing, leaving after the government’s lawyer, John Sauer, finished his argument after facing tough, skeptical questioning.
During the hearing, Chief Justice John Roberts dismissed the claim that contemporary globalization counsels changing the rules on birthright citizenship. “It’s a new world, but the same Constitution,” said Roberts. When the hearing ended, Trump expressed his frustration on Truth, his social network: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!,” he wrote, advancing a favored — though plainly false — argument: the United States is not alone in recognizing that right.
What Trump sought was to overturn more than a century of interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War. In a landmark 1898 decision concerning an Asian immigrant, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment broadly, guaranteeing automatic citizenship to virtually all children born in the country. Since then, children of immigrants born in the United States have acquired nationality regardless of their parents’ legal status.
That includes those who happened to be born here by chance. One example is Folarin Balogun, a forward for the U.S. men’s national soccer team. He was born in Brooklyn 25 years ago after his mother was unable to fly home while seven months pregnant.
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