WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court smacked down President Trump’s executive order denying birthright citizenship to children of illegal immigrants and tourists Tuesday, quashing a marquee policy of his for the second time in under five months.
Trump’s day one order had been in limbo amid a legal battle over whether it violated the 14th Amendment, which 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.”
In a 5-4 ruling, the court found that even those “born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present” are covered by the equal protection amendment, meaning a change to the Constitution would be required to change their status.
“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,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order—’mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’— are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter.”
Roberts was joined in the majority by fellow conservative Amy Coney Barrett and liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — a rare combination on the divided court.
Conservative justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing Trump’s order should have been allowed to come into force. Justice Brett Kavanaugh split the difference, arguing that the order did not violate the 14th Amendment, but did violate federal law — and a change in the status of children born to foreigners could be brought about by Congress alone.
More than 250,000 babies born in the US each year would have been affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.
Trump became the first-ever sitting US president to attend Supreme Court oral arguments when the justices heard the case April 1.
The administration had not been expected to prevail, with experts expressing skepticism that Trump could unilaterally restrict the definition of birthright citizenship via executive order.
In February, Trump was dealt a similar blow when the Supreme Court ruled that he couldn’t use the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose customized tariffs on foreign countries at will.
A key precedent in the birthright case was the 1898 US v. Wong Kim Ark ruling, which dealt with a dispute over the status of a man born to Chinese immigrants who were in America legally but barred from being US citizens due to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court sided with Wong and ruled that almost all native born children in the US automatically become citizens unless they are the offspring of occupying hostile forces, foreign rulers or diplomats, or born on foreign ships in US ports.
During oral arguments, Solicitor General John Sauer pointed out that the Wong Kim Ark case dealt with a child of legal, domiciled immigrants rather than illegal aliens.
Roberts rejected the idea of any difference between the two, writing that “the Court exhaustively canvassed the text and history of the Citizenship Clause.
“It traced an unbroken line from the English common law, into the founding and antebellum eras, and through the debates, to the Clause’s ratification,” he added. “Yet at no point did the Court identify any evidence in the historical record that the ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment thought themselves to be imposing a domicile limitation.”
The case decided Thursday, Trump v. Barbara, stems from a challenge by three people left in limbo by the order.
The titular party, Barbara, is a Honduran asylum applicant who gave birth in October of last year. Another is Susan, a Taiwanese citizen in the US on a student visa whose daughter was born in April 2025. The baby’s US passport application was in progress at the time of the suit. The third is Mark, a Brazilian applicant for permanent residency whose son was born in March 2025 and initially received a US passport.
All three filed suit under pseudonyms, alleging that the order unlawfully stripped their children of US citizenship and its attendant benefits, including Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps.
A New Hampshire federal judge issued a preliminary injunction and certified the plaintiffs’ children and others in a similar position as a nationwide class.
“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,’” Roberts concluded his opinion.
