Washington DC: In a major legal defeat for the Trump administration, the United States Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down an executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship. The nation’s highest court upheld automatic citizenship for all children born within the United States, cementing a core pillar of American immigration law. The ruling delivers a significant blow to a key policy platform of President Donald Trump’s second term, which had heavily focused on restricting both legal and illegal immigration, particularly targeting what his administration termed “birth tourism.”
According to official court documents shared by CNN, the Supreme Court ruled that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country remain fully entitled to automatic US citizenship. The majority opinion clarified that this right is explicitly protected under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In reaching its conclusion, the bench heavily relied on the historical legal precedent established in the landmark case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which originally affirmed that children born on US soil to foreign nationals are entitled to birthright citizenship.
The ruling has triggered sharp reactions from the White House and civil rights organizations alike. President Trump had previously expressed strong opposition to such an outcome, writing on social media in May that a negative ruling on birthright citizenship, combined with recent judicial challenges to his tariff policies, would not be economically sustainable for the United States. Conversely, civil rights groups across the country celebrated the judicial intervention. Deborah Fleischaker, a former Homeland Security official currently with the Latino advocacy group UnidosUS, expressed widespread sentiment among advocates, describing the high court’s decision as “a huge relief.”
The judicial split revealed notable alignments among the justices, as reported by the New York Times. Three of the court’s staunch conservatives—Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch, and Samuel A. Alito Jr.—dissented from the ruling. While Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the liberal justices and Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority to strike down the executive order, he noted in a separate opinion that he based his decision on existing federal law rather than a direct constitutional interpretation. During the hearings, the administration’s legal counsel argued unsuccessfully that the 14th Amendment required parents to be legally domiciled with a permanent intent to remain in the US. Rejecting that premise, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, emphasizing that citizenship represents the right to have rights and participate in the political community, a promise the Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended to every person born in the land.
