Supreme Court blocks Trump bid to end birthright citizenship

The Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship in a 6-3 ruling that left his executive order unenforceable and held that children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented and Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment and dissented in part.

The decision, in Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365, came after the court heard two hours of oral argument on April 1, 2026. It rested heavily on the Citizenship Clause’s historical meaning, including English common law, the post-Civil War rejection of Dred Scott v. Sandford and the 1898 United States v. Wong Kim Ark decision, which protects nearly everyone born on U.S. soil. Roberts’s opinion rejected Trump’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment as too narrow to strip citizenship from children based on their parents’ immigration status.

Trump signed Executive Order No. 14160, Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship, on January 20, 2025. The order says that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully present or only temporarily present are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore are not citizens at birth. Several parents sued on behalf of themselves and their children, and a U.S. district court provisionally certified a nationwide class of children who would have been denied citizenship under the order before preliminarily blocking enforcement.

Kavanaugh’s partial dissent said Congress could still try to change the rules by statute, even though the court rejected the executive branch’s attempt to do so on its own. Republican lawmakers have pushed legislation aimed at ending birthright citizenship.

Opponents warned the executive order could have stripped citizenship from hundreds of thousands of children each year.