Washington (Somalia Today) — The US Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld birthright citizenship for children born in the United States, striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to deny citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors.
The ruling dealt a major blow to one of Trump’s signature immigration policies and reaffirmed a constitutional principle rooted in the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War to overturn the legacy of slavery and the Dred Scott decision.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the court, said the Constitution guarantees citizenship to nearly everyone born in the US, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote.
“The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” he added. “We keep that promise today.”
Trump signed the order on the first day of his second term, declaring that children born in the United States would not automatically become citizens if their mothers were in the country unlawfully or only temporarily, and if their fathers were not US citizens or lawful permanent residents.
Several parents challenged the measure, arguing that it violated both the 14th Amendment and federal immigration law. Lower courts blocked the order before it could take effect nationwide.
Civil War amendment
The case forced the court to revisit one of the most consequential sentences in the US Constitution: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens.”
Roberts said that language reflected a long-standing rule inherited from English common law and embedded in American law after the Civil War.
“A child born on American soil and subject to American law was made an American citizen,” he wrote.
The court said the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” refers to people who are governed by US law while within US territory, not to the legal status of their parents.
That interpretation left only narrow exceptions, including children of foreign diplomats and, historically, children born under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes before Congress later extended citizenship to Native Americans.
Roberts said the Trump administration had tried to add limits that the Constitution does not contain.
“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,” he wrote.
He noted that words central to Trump’s order — including “mother,” “father,” “lawful” and “temporary” — do not appear in the clause.
Wong Kim Ark
The majority also relied heavily on the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a US citizen.
That ruling came during an era of intense anti-Chinese immigration laws, but the court still held that birth on US soil generally conferred citizenship.
Roberts said Wong Kim Ark confirmed that the 14th Amendment adopted the “fundamental rule of citizenship by birth” and rejected attempts to tie citizenship to a parent’s domicile or legal status.
The decision placed the court’s majority — Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson — behind a broad reading of birthright citizenship.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed that Trump’s order could not stand, but he did not fully join Roberts’ constitutional reasoning.
Conservative dissent
Three conservative justices — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — dissented.
Thomas accused the majority of taking “the extraordinary step” of declaring Trump’s order unconstitutional on its face.
“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” he wrote.
He argued that the 14th Amendment had been “designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks” but had been “repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
Alito and Gorsuch also filed dissents, underscoring the ideological divide over immigration, executive power and the meaning of Reconstruction-era constitutional protections.
Trump setback
The ruling marked a significant legal defeat for Trump, who has long attacked birthright citizenship as a driver of illegal immigration and so-called birth tourism.
He had argued that wealthy foreign women travelled to the United States to give birth so their children could obtain American citizenship, and he criticised judges who blocked his order.
But the justices said the Constitution left no room for the president to rewrite the rule by executive order.
The decision also became another test of Trump’s expansive view of presidential power, after several lower courts had already rejected the citizenship restrictions.
For more than a century, birthright citizenship has stood as one of the clearest rules in US constitutional law: almost everyone born in the United States is American at birth.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court said that rule still stands.
