The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected President Donald Trump’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship, ruling that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are citizens under the Constitution.
In a decision released Tuesday morning in Trump v. Barbara, the high court found unconstitutional an executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office last year that sought to limit automatic citizenship for certain children born in the United States.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Roberts pointed to the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which states that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
“If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Roberts wrote.
“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.’ … We keep that promise today.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch each filed dissenting opinions.
Thomas argued in dissent that neither the Civil Rights Act nor the Citizenship Clause, as originally enacted, “guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”
“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Thomas wrote.
“In doing so, the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Trump’s executive order sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to illegal immigrants and temporary immigrants.
“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” the order stated.
The order faced several legal challenges, including a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other progressive advocacy groups.
After multiple lower courts blocked the order with nationwide injunctions, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court. The justices agreed last December to hear oral arguments in the case.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance both criticized the Supreme Court’s decision. Trump called it “too bad for our country,” while Vance described the court’s interpretation as an “absurdity” that illegal immigrants are exploiting as “a legal loophole.”
