Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump Order, Upholds Birthright Citizenship
Favour Bitrus
June 30, 2026
Picture Credit: Tim Mossholder
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, ruling that the measure violated the Constitution and preserving a principle that has defined American citizenship for more than 150 years. The 6-3 decision in Trump v. Barbara rejected the administration’s attempt to deny automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to parents who entered the country illegally or who hold temporary visas.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Amy Coney Barrett. “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.’ We keep that promise today.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a separate opinion concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part.
The case centered on Executive Order 14160, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which Trump signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of his second term. The order directed federal agencies to stop recognizing citizenship for children whose parents were unlawfully or only temporarily present in the country. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that roughly 255,000 children are born to noncitizen parents in the United States each year, a population that would have been affected had the order taken effect.
At the core of the ruling was the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause, which provides that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. The administration argued that the clause required a parent’s lawful domicile in the country, but Roberts rejected that reading, writing that there was “scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view.” The Court grounded its decision in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese immigrants was a citizen regardless of his parents’ status.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito dissented. Thomas wrote the principal dissent, joined by Gorsuch, arguing that the concept of domicile was central to the Court’s earlier citizenship precedent. Gorsuch and Alito each filed additional dissenting opinions.
Reaction was immediate. The case was argued in April by Cecillia Wang of the American Civil Liberties Union, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, who represented the lead plaintiff, a Honduran asylum seeker known by the pseudonym Barbara. Legal experts noted that the ruling reinforces a settled principle, holding that any fundamental change to who qualifies as a citizen would require a constitutional amendment rather than an executive order.
