The United States Supreme Court has halted one of the major immigration objectives of Donald Trump. The Court has rejected his attempt to end, by decree, birthright citizenship, the principle that recognizes almost every person born on US territory as American, even when their parents are undocumented immigrants or are there on temporary visas.
The decision comes with a majority of six votes to three and directly strikes down an executive order signed by Trump on January 20, 2025, the first day of his return to the White House. That order required federal agencies to stop recognizing automatic citizenship for children born in the United States if neither of their parents was a US citizen or a legal permanent resident.
The Supreme Court has upheld the historical interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, approved in 1868 after the Civil War. That clause states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States. Trump tried to reopen that debate with a restrictive reading of the constitutional text. The majority of the court has not bought it.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, signed the main opinion. In it, he recalls that citizenship was and continues to be “the right to have rights,” a phrase that summarizes the political scope of the ruling. Roberts was supported by the three liberal justices and two conservative judges, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, both appointed by Trump during his first term in the White House. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch voted against.
The ruling not only corrects Trump. It also avoids a scenario of enormous legal uncertainty for hundreds of thousands of children born each year in the United States. Estimates handled during the litigation pointed to about 250,000 babies annually affected by the order. Many would have been left without automatic citizenship, with the risk of legal limbo and with families forced to prove the immigration status of their parents to access basic documents.
The Constitution once again sets the limit
The case touches a very sensitive nerve in the United States. Birthright citizenship is linked to the reconstruction of the country after slavery and to the 1898 precedent regarding Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents. That ruling consolidated that birth on U.S. soil grants citizenship, with very specific exceptions, such as the children of foreign diplomats.
Trump turned this issue into a banner of his immigration agenda. He presented it as a tool against irregular immigration and so-called birth tourism. The Court, however, has made it clear that a president cannot change a constitutional right established for more than a century by executive order.
The Republican has reacted on Truth Social calling the ruling bad for the country and has asked Congress to act to end birthright citizenship. The legislative path is not simple either. A constitutional reform would require very broad majorities in both chambers and ratification by three-quarters of the states. In practice, Trump's margin is very limited.
The setback also comes after another uncomfortable decision for the president. On Monday, the Supreme Court endorsed that Mississippi can count mail-in ballots received up to five days after Election Day as long as they are postmarked on or before the day of voting. The decision affects similar laws in other states and clashes with Trump's offensive against postal voting, one of his obsessions since the 2020 defeat against Joe Biden.
One step forward, one step back: another favorable ruling for Trump in the cultural war
The judicial day has not been only negative for the president. The Supreme Court also upheld the laws of Idaho and West Virginia that prohibit trans athletes from participating in school and university women's teams. The decision reinforces one of the great cultural battles of the American right and will have effects beyond those two states, because there are similar rules in much of the country.
Trump celebrated that ruling with a triumphant message on his social network, where he presented the ruling as a “great victory” against the participation of trans women in women's competitions. The majority opinion, written by Kavanaugh, holds that states can organize women's sports teams based on biological sex and that these laws do not violate Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Supreme Court's end-of-term photo thus leaves a mixed balance. Trump gains support for part of his cultural agenda but loses on two central fronts for his political project. First, mail-in voting. Second, birthright citizenship. In both cases, the Court has set a limit on two offensives that sought to touch basic rules of American democracy and legal belonging to the country.
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