US Supreme Court rejects Trump's bid to end birthright citizenship

Donald Trump’s controversial attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in the US has been rejected by the Supreme Court, upending the president’s hardline agenda on immigration. 

The 6-3 ruling marked the second time this year that the court has invalidated one of Mr Trump’s major initiatives, following its February decision to strike down his sweeping global tariffs.

The justices upheld a lower court’s decision that blocked Mr Trump’s executive order directing US agencies not to recognise the citizenship of children born in the US if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called a “green card” holder.

Challengers to Mr Trump’s order argued that it violates language in the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment that confers citizenship to those born in America who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”. 

Mr Trump, who has repeatedly tested the limits of presidential power in domestic and foreign policy, issued the order last year on his first day back in office as part of a suite of policies to crack down on legal and illegal immigration. Critics have accused the Republican president of racial and religious discrimination in his approach to immigration.

Mr Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that the ruling on birthright citizenship was “too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation”.

“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!” Mr Trump wrote.

The challengers said the Supreme Court had already settled the question of birthright citizenship in an 1898 case called United States v Wong Kim Ark, which recognised that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on US soil, including to the children of foreign nationals.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored Tuesday’s ruling, pointed to that 1898 ruling.

“We see no reason to depart from that view today.”

Justice Roberts said there was “scant evidence” to support the Trump administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of how to interpret the citizenship language of the 14th Amendment to limit birthright citizenship.

“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,” Justice Roberts wrote.

The Supreme Court has weighed in on what it means to be an American citizen just ahead of the July 4 holiday, when the United States will mark the 250th anniversary of its founding.

Ahead of the ruling, some experts had estimated that Mr Trump’s directive could affect the legal status of as many as 250,000 ‌babies born each year and could require the families of millions more to prove the citizenship status of their newborns.

Class-action lawsuit

The legal challenge to Mr Trump’s directive considered by the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, involved a class-action lawsuit filed in New Hampshire by parents and children whose citizenship was threatened by the directive.

The 14th Amendment has long been interpreted as guaranteeing citizenship for babies born in the US, with only narrow exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats or members of an enemy occupying force.

The provision at issue, known as the Citizenship Clause, states: “All 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.”

The administration has asserted that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that being born in the US is not enough for citizenship, and excludes the babies of immigrants who are in the country illegally or whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.

Citizenship is granted only to the children of those whose “primary allegiance” is to the United States, including citizens and permanent residents, the administration has argued. Such allegiance is established through “lawful domicile”, which lawyers for the administration define as “lawful, permanent residence within a nation, with intent to remain”.

When the Supreme Court considered the case on April 1, Mr Trump made history as the first sitting president to attend arguments before the top US judicial body, though he left midway through, not long after the lawyer arguing against the administration had begun.

The Supreme Court last year gave Mr Trump an initial victory in the birthright citizenship context in a ruling ​restricting the power of federal judges to curb presidential policies nationwide. That decision, however, did not resolve the legality of Mr Trump’s directive.

Democratic state attorneys-general who had pursued their own legal challenge to Mr Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order hailed the Supreme Court’s decision.

New York Attorney-General Letitia James in a statement called birthright citizenship “a constitutional guarantee that has defined this nation for generations.”

‘Birth tourism’

During the arguments, US Solicitor General D John Sauer, representing the administration, said the promise of citizenship for virtually any baby born on US soil had spawned what he called a sprawling industry of “birth tourism”. 

Mr Sauer said that “uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades” to secure citizenship for their children. Asked to explain how serious an issue “birth tourism” had become, Mr Sauer primarily cited media reports and conceded that “no-one knows for sure”.

The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the civil war of 1861 to 1865 that ended slavery in the US, and overturned a notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision that had declared that people of African descent could never be US citizens.

During arguments, Sauer described what he saw as the limited purpose of the 14th Amendment Citizenship Clause, saying it was adopted “to grant citizenship to the newly freed slaves and their children, whose allegiance to the United States had been established by generations of domicile here”.

An 1898 precedent 

The administration contended that the 1898 precedent supported Mr Trump’s order because, according to the court’s ruling in that case, at the time of his birth, Wong Kim Ark’s parents had permanent domicile and residence in the US.

Some of the justices pushed back on that during arguments, with conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch telling Sauer: “Well, I’m not sure how much you want to rely on Wong Kim Ark”.

Mr Trump for years had threatened to limit who qualifies for citizenship at birth.

The president wrote on social media last year: “Birthright Citizenship was not meant for people taking vacations to become permanent Citizens of the United States of America, and bringing their families with them, all the time laughing at the ‘SUCKERS’ that we are!”

“But the drug cartels love it! We are, for the sake of being politically correct, a STUPID Country but, in actuality, this is the exact opposite of being politically correct, and it is yet another point that leads to the dysfunction of America,” Mr Trump wrote.

Concord, New Hampshire-based US District Judge Joseph Laplante in July 2025 let the challenge to Mr Trump’s order by the plaintiffs in the case before him proceed as a class, thus allowing the policy to be blocked nationwide.

Immigration rulings 

The court’s conservative majority has backed Mr Trump on other major immigration-related policies since he returned to the presidency.

For instance, the court on June 25 cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protected them from deportation. On the same day, it sided with him by backing the US government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deemed US-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.

In other cases, it let Trump expand mass deportation measures on an interim basis while legal challenges played out, such as ending humanitarian protections for certain migrants, deporting people to countries where they have no ties and carrying out aggressive immigration raids that can target individuals based on their race or language.

The court, however, has not always ruled in Mr Trump’s favour. In February, it struck down sweeping tariffs he pursued under a law meant for use in national emergencies. And on Monday, local time, it refused to let him fire Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook.

Tuesday was the final day of rulings for the court’s current term, which began in October.

Reuters