The US Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship, which grants citizenship to nearly all people born in the United States, delivering a significant blow to a central element of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to children born in the United States, including those whose parents are in the country unlawfully or only temporarily, striking down President Trump’s executive order.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” the ruling says.
The Court also drew on its landmark precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that children born in the United States to foreign parents are entitled to birthright citizenship.
This ruling comes after President Trump warned in May that “a negative ruling on Birthright Citizenship, on top of the recent Supreme Court Tariff catastrophe, is not economically sustainable for the United States of America!”, according to the New York Times.
It further reported that three of the court’s conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented. Justice Brett M Kavanaugh joined the court’s majority to strike down the executive order, but he said he based his decision on a federal law, not on the Constitution.
Civil rights groups rejoiced on Tuesday following the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Trump administration’s executive order. Deborah Fleischaker, a former Homeland Security official who now works with the Latino advocacy group UnidosUS, described the ruling as “a huge relief,” according to New York Times.
CNN reported that one of the primary arguments made by President Donald Trump’s attorneys was that the 14th Amendment requires individuals to be domiciled, meaning they must have the intention of remaining in the United States to qualify for birthright citizenship.
On the hearing, the American broadcaster reported that Chief Justice John Roberts said, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote for the court. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
The ruling represents a major setback for Trump, who had made ending “birth tourism” one of the key issues of his second-term campaign, with his administration taking a strong stance against both legal and illegal immigration.
