The United States Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship, rejecting an executive order by President Donald Trump that sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily.
In a 6-3 decision, the nation’s highest court ruled that the president’s order violated the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil, with limited exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights,” adding that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” The ruling marks a significant legal setback for President Trump, who signed the executive order on his first day back in office as part of his administration’s broader immigration agenda. Had the order taken effect, tens of thousands of children born each year to undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders could have been denied U.S. citizenship.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that the executive order could not stand, citing a federal law passed in 1940 that broadly guarantees citizenship to people born in the United States, although he differed on the constitutional reasoning. Three conservative justices dissented, with Justice Samuel Alito calling the court’s decision a “serious mistake.”
Following the ruling, President Trump criticized the decision on social media, describing the outcome as “too bad for our Country.”
The decision reaffirms more than 150 years of constitutional precedent established under the Fourteenth Amendment, preserving birthright citizenship as a fundamental right in the United States.
