{"id":215523,"date":"2026-07-01T02:20:44","date_gmt":"2026-07-01T02:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/what-to-know-about-the-us-supreme-court-ruling-on-birthright-citizenship-the-guardian\/"},"modified":"2026-07-01T02:20:44","modified_gmt":"2026-07-01T02:20:44","slug":"what-to-know-about-the-us-supreme-court-ruling-on-birthright-citizenship-the-guardian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/what-to-know-about-the-us-supreme-court-ruling-on-birthright-citizenship-the-guardian\/","title":{"rendered":"What to know about the US supreme court ruling on birthright citizenship – The Guardian"},"content":{"rendered":"

What will Trump do now after justices\u2019 stunning rebuke to his anti-immigration agenda?
In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump\u2019s aggressive anti-immigrant agenda, the US supreme court<\/a> ruled against<\/a> the president\u2019s highly contentious attempt to end the right to US citizenship for children born in the United States.
The justices ruled that the Trump administration<\/a> violated a provision of the 14th amendment, which was affirmed by the supreme court 128 years ago.
\u201cChildren born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are \u2018subject to the jurisdiction\u2019 of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment\u2019s Citizenship Clause,\u201d the ruling reads, in a rebuke to the administration\u2019s argument that children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign visitors were ineligible for citizenship.
Trump issued an executive order<\/a> on the first day of his second term in office that sought to undo birthright citizenship<\/a>, which swiftly drew lawsuits, including from the Democratic state attorneys general and the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU argued in front of the court on the case during oral arguments in April for Trump v Barbara, a class-action challenge to the order, brought by parents of children who would be affected by the change.
The Trump administration<\/a> argued that the landmark decision on birthright citizenship \u2013 United States v Wong Kim Ark \u2013 relied on parents having permanent \u201cdomicile\u201d in the US. However, the term is not included in the 14th amendment.
Here\u2019s what to know:
The legal principle of jus soli<\/em>, <\/em>or \u201cright of the soil<\/a>\u201d, allows nearly everyone born on US soil to become a US citizen.
Dozens of countries also have a right to citizenship based on place of birth, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina.
By contrast, many countries extend citizenship under the principle of jus sanguinis<\/em>, or \u201cright of blood\u201d, which is determined by the nationality of a child\u2019s parents regardless of the location of birth.
The concept of jus soli<\/em> comes from English common law<\/a>, which held centuries ago that people born in England were natural subjects.
But unrestricted birthright citizenship in the US that includes people of color \u2013 not just white Americans<\/a> \u2013 derives from the US constitution. In 1857, the supreme court ruled in its Dred Scott decision<\/a> that Black descendants of enslaved people were not US citizens, but \u201ca separate class of persons\u201d.
To right this injustice, just over a decade later during the Reconstruction era following the US civil war, the US ratified the 14th amendment<\/a> in 1868 to codify the rights of Black Americans. It established that \u201call persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside\u201d.
Known as the citizenship clause, this phrase \u2013 alongside<\/a> a number of related statutes and regulations \u2013 establishes the modern basis for birthright citizenship.
Even as the 14th amendment was ratified, Americans were starting to turn against immigrants in the US, especially Chinese workers. Soon, Congress had enacted legislation<\/a> to heavily restrict further Chinese migration and make life difficult for those already stateside.
Wong Kim Ark<\/a>, a young man born in San Francisco to immigrant parents, went to China to see his family. When he tried to return home to the US, he was not allowed into the country based on the allegation that he was not a US citizen.
But the supreme court saw the situation differently. In an 1898 precedential decision that has withstood the test of time, the justices ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark\u2019s US citizenship claim even though his parents were Chinese immigrants unable to naturalize.
There are exceedingly rare exceptions to the principle of jus soli<\/em>, where people born in the US are not automatically granted US citizenship.
Until the enactment of a law in 1924, Indigenous peoples born in the US were excluded<\/a>. <\/em>
In 2021, the supreme court decided that people born in American Samoa\u2019s unincorporated territories are not automatically guaranteed birthright citizenship, unless Congress enacts legislation. And the children of foreign diplomats<\/a> or of enemy occupiers also lack a right to US citizenship by birth.
Trump\u2019s executive order sought to redefine the meaning of the 14th amendment based on the claim that children born to non-citizen parents who are either unlawfully in the country or who possess temporary legal status, such as tourists or foreign students, are not \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d of the US and therefore ineligible for birthright citizenship.
The order sought to restrict citizenship to children of current American citizens or other lawful permanent residents that have established \u201cdomicile\u201d in the United States.
Trump claimed birthright citizenship was a \u201cscam\u201d that \u201cripped off\u201d taxpayers by allowing undocumented migrants to take advantage of the benefits of the US welfare state. However, during the oral arguments in Trump v Barbara, the government\u2019s lawyer conceded that \u201cno one knows for sure\u201d how significant a problem so-called \u201cbirth tourism\u201d actually is.
The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration thinktank, said that there are between 20,000 to 26,000 births<\/a> by women on tourist visas annually. That is less than 1% of all babies born in the US each year.
Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the opinion. He was joined by liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. Conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the judgment, but dissented in part.
The majority opinion walks through the plain meanings of citizenship, from English common law in to slavery and then emancipation, and then in to efforts to undermine citizenship, including the Chinese exclusion act<\/a>.
Roberts wrote that the \u201codious\u201d decision in Dred Scott denied citizenship to Black people, arguing then that it was \u201cblood, not soil\u201d that decided citizenship. That was overturned via the 14th amendment, which the court affirmed in its decision to uphold birthright citizenship.
\u201cCitizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights \u2013 to freely participate in our political community,\u201d the majority opinion reads. \u201cThe Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to \u2018every free-born person in this land.\u2019 We keep that promise today.\u201d
In her concurring opinion, Jackson wrote that the 14th amendment\u2019s \u201cuniversalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim \u2013 one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright\u201d.
\u201cThe America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation\u2019s founding \u2013 that all human beings are created equal \u2013 once more.\u201d
The conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions. The court\u2019s writings in the ruling span 194 pages, nearly 90 of which were written by Thomas in dissent, his longest in his tenure on the court.
Thomas writes that Black people were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans with \u201cno other homeland\u201d or allegiance to other nations. \u201cThe same could not be said for the children of foreign temporary visitors,\u201d he wrote. \u201cForeign temporary visitors were attached to their home country, lacked similar bonds to this country, and would not be called upon in time of war.\u201d
Kavanaugh wrote in a partial concurrence that he does not believe Trump\u2019s executive order violates the 14th amendment, but that it does violate a federal statute. Congress could, he wrote, amend the federal statute or create new legislation to establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to parents who do not have permanent legal status in the country.
Alito, in his dissent, called the decision \u201cone of the most important\u201d in the court\u2019s history, but, in his estimation, \u201cthe Court has made a serious mistake\u201d.
He mentioned the idea of \u201cbirth tourists\u201d and believes the 14th amendment grants citizenship solely to those children who \u201cowe allegiance solely to this country\u201d and argues that this interpretation of the law would not require uprooting the lives of children born here to parents not in the country legally. He, like Kavanaugh, floated the idea of Congress addressing the issue.
\u201cSome members of this group have lived here for years, and they have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the land where they grew up,\u201d Alito writes. \u201cCongress can and should address their situation. The Fourteenth Amendment dictates who must<\/em> be a citizen, but it does not address who may<\/em> be a citizen by Act of Congress.\u201d
Trump called Tuesday\u2019s decision \u201ctoo bad\u201d, but appeared undeterred, insisting: \u201cWe can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation.\u201d He wrote on his Truth Social platform: \u201cCongress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship.\u201d
Overturning a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds majority vote of both chambers of Congress, or the legislatures of two-thirds of the states to call for a convention, a much higher bar than passing a new statute.
So instead, Trump is pushing for lawmakers to create new legislation that establish exceptions to birthright citizenship for children born to parents who do not have permanent legal status in the US.
But any legislation would need to overcome the 60-vote filibuster, which has proven to be frequently insurmountable on extremely divisive bills during his second term.
Read more coverage of today\u2019s supreme court rulings:<\/strong>
US supreme court rules states can exclude trans athletes from female sports<\/a>
US supreme court strikes down limit on spending by political parties in support of candidates<\/a>
US supreme court upholds birthright citizenship in blow to Trump agenda<\/a><\/p>\n

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What will Trump do now after justices\u2019 stunning rebuke to his anti-immigration agenda?In a stunning rebuke to Donald Trump\u2019s aggressive anti-immigrant agenda, the US supreme court ruled against the president\u2019s highly contentious attempt to end the right to US citizenship for children born in the United States.The justices ruled that the Trump administration violated a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":215524,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-215523","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-us","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/215524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quixnet.net\/wpinstance\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}