The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, ruling 6–3 against President Donald Trump’s effort to end the longstanding constitutional right via executive order.
Birthright citizenship dates back to Reconstruction. Under the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship and equal protection to the children of formerly enslaved people, anyone born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen.
Trump issued the executive order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” just hours after being sworn back into office in early 2025 — and the administration was almost immediately sued in response. Defending the executive order before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. Sauer argued that noncitizens and their children aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, since their loyalty lies with a foreign power.
An estimated 250,000 children are born on US soil to noncitizen parents each year. The birthright citizenship ban would not have gone into effect retroactively, but would have applied to anyone born 30 days after Trump’s executive order was issued.
Even conservative justices were skeptical of the administration’s argument. After Sauer claimed that the 14th Amendment needs to be revisited because we live in a different world than that of Reconstruction, Justice Neil Gorsuch countered: “it’s the same Constitution.” Still, the fact that such a fundamental constitutional right was up for debate shows just how much Trump’s nativist vision has affected American politics.
Gorsuch ultimately caved, not only signing onto Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion but also writing one of his own. Justice Samuel Alito also dissented.