Supreme Court Rejects Trump’s Attempt to End Birthright Citizenship
The ruling reaffirms that babies born on U.S. soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ status, follows other wins for Trump on immigration.
;)
Education news and commentary, delivered right to your inbox.
Sign up for 91ɬ newsletter.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for 91ɬ Newsletter
The Supreme Court ruled today that President Donald J. Trump exceeded his authority with his long-shot attempt to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to undocumented parents or those without permanent status.
In a 6-3 ruling, the court held Trump overreached when he tried to usurp the 14th Amendment by executive order at the start of his second term. It was one of the president’s boldest moves in what would become a sustained campaign to curtail immigration.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. wrote for the majority. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
Justices Sonia M. Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett concurred. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh agreed in part — for the executive order to be lawful, he argues, Congress would need to amend or enact legislation — and justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Jr., and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
“As interpreted by the Court today, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone who happens to be born in this country, including the children of ‘birth tourists,’ women who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth to a child and then promptly return home,” Alito wrote.
While Trump was predicted to lose this battle — the justices appeared skeptical of the government’s legal reasoning during oral arguments in April — immigrant advocates expressed relief about the decision.
“Reaffirming birthright citizenship matters enormously for our schools, where immigrant-origin students are the fastest-growing group of young people — and the vast majority are American citizens, many by birthright,” said Adam Strom, executive director and co-founder of Reimagining Migration. “A decision the other way would have told millions of children, and the classmates beside them, that their place here was conditional.”
Wendy Cervantes, a director at The Center for Law and Social Policy, said the birthright ruling was important for several reasons, primarily because it was “fundamentally about how our country treats babies in the earliest days of life.”
She notes it has long ensured all children born in the U.S. have some degree of equal footing, including access to health care and other protections they need from the start.
“If the Trump administration had been allowed to restrict birthright citizenship, it would have been yet another way to expand their deportation machine, adding newborns to the list of deportation targets,” Cervantes said.
Some 320,000 babies were born to unauthorized mothers or those with legal temporary status in 2023, according to the Pew Research Center, representing 9% of all infants born in the United States that year. Roughly would not have qualified for birthright citizenship if Trump’s executive order had been enacted at that time, the research group found.
Thomas, in writing his dissent, addressed the circumstances that led to the 14th Amendment, namely to ensure that the children of formerly enslaved people would be recognized as citizens.
Black people “were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other Authority.”
The same cannot be said of the children of foreign-born parents, he wrote.
“Foreign temporary visitors were attached to their home country, lacked similar bonds to this country, and would not be called upon in time of war,” he found. “Americans, consistent with their settler ethos, believed that citizens were the people who called a place home.”
Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union who argued the case in favor of birthright citizenship, said “this is a day of celebration,” telling CNN the decision “reaffirms one of the fundamental pillars of American life. That all of us who are born on American soil are citizens alike.”
Reacting to the idea that Congress could undo the 14th Amendment, Wang, herself a birthright citizen, said, “If they want to try to overturn it by constitutional amendment, good luck to them because they are going against the will of the people of the United States.”
In Tuesday afternoon, Trump claimed that Congress could easily undo the Supreme Court’s ruling without a “long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment,” but that does appear to be a real legislative pathway.
While the justices turned back the president on birthright citizenship, they handed Trump two other critical immigration-related victories late last week.
The court ended for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants, who were permitted to live and work here because their homelands were deemed too violent or unstable. It also agreed that people waiting just outside the nation’s border could not claim if they had not physically set foot in the U.S. — and sanctioned the government’s ability to turn them away.
Asylum is a protection from deportation for those who have been persecuted in their home countries or have a well-founded fear of harm there.
Hundreds of thousands of children have sought this protection in recent years, arriving or with their families. An untold number have been turned back at the border.
In fiscal year 2023, the U.S. granted asylum to people, according to : 26% were under age 18.
Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to provide short-term humanitarian relief for those who could not safely return to their country of origin. The high court recognized, in its opinion, that while the program was designed to offer interim help, many TPS recipients had been living in the country for decades.
Last year, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced these protections would terminate within months. Both communities sued the government over the move: Syrians cited procedural flaws and the U.S.’s failure to assess the safety of their home country and Haitians pointed to prior statements by the president and Noem they said revealed racial animus and bias.
Lower courts ruled that the government could not proceed but the six conservative justices decided in the administration’s favor.
Justice Kagan, writing for the minority that included Sotomayor and Jackson, said that Trump’s comments falsely claiming Haitians ate neighborhood pets “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”
Tsion Gurmu, a Houston-based immigration attorney and legal director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, said the decision reflects longstanding racial discrimination.
“The majority of the justices held that the litany of racial slurs and stereotypes Trump directed at Haitians were not racist,” she said. “However, as the dissent makes clear, racism is the basis of the administration’s revocation of Haitian TPS and other racist immigration policies enacted by this administration. One of the major takeaways for folks grappling with this decision should be that racial justice is an immigrant rights issue.”
The Trump administration aims to end the program entirely, including for immigrants from Burma (Myanmar), El Salvador, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.
Cervantes, in comparing the court’s birthright decision to its move to end TPS for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, just as it did for Venezuelans last year, notes these groups need more than temporary cover.
“At the end of the day, the overall takeaway for me is that it demonstrates the importance of creating and protecting pathways to citizenship, since temporary forms can too often become vulnerable,” she said. “Yet, the current administration continues to attempt to block newcomers — even newborn babies — from ever being able to access citizenship.”
Did you use this article in your work?
We’d love to hear how 91ɬ’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers.
