Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship in rebuke to Trump administration

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that virtually all people born in the United States are American citizens, striking down President Donald Trump's executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court affirmed that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted after the Civil War in 1868, confers that right. The decision came a week after the court's conservative majority sided with the Trump administration in two other immigration-related cases and a day after the six Republican-appointed justices further expanded executive authority, showing that the president's effort to end a longstanding tenet of American nationhood went too far even for a court that has broadly aided his agenda.

"Citizenship, then as now, was the right to have rights - to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land,' " Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion, quoting Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois from a debate in 1866. "We keep that promise today."

Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented. In his dissent, Alito called the majority's decision "a serious mistake" and argued that "the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country."

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., hailed the decision in a social media post punctuated with American flag emojis.

"If you're born in America, you're an American," Murray wrote. "Today's decision is a victory but also a reminder that our constitutional values are under fierce attack by far-right extremists."

Rep. Michael Baumgartner, a Spokane Republican who has co-sponsored legislation to restrict birthright citizenship, denounced the ruling in a statement.

"I'm disappointed the Court maintained the farcical notion that 14th amendment means that birthism-tourists can subvert the spirit of what it means to be a United States citizen," Baumgartner said. "Congress should work to close this loophole."

Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with the majority but wrote a separate, concurring opinion in which he defended birthright citizenship on statutory grounds, pointing to language in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. That would support the idea that Congress could change statute passed by lawmakers in the past.

But in the majority opinion, Roberts - joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson - ruled on constitutional grounds, citing the 14th Amendment itself as the basis of the right to citizenship for children born in the United States. That suggests a far more durable protection, which could only be changed through a constitutional amendment.

The 14th Amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the states as part of the Reconstruction effort following the Civil War. By guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born in the United States, with narrow exceptions, the amendment overruled the Supreme Court's 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, where the court ruled that Americans descended from enslaved Africans could not become citizens.

Today, those narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship apply to the children of foreign diplomats living in the United States; children born aboard foreign vessels; the children of occupying forces; and those born in American Samoa, a U.S. territory whose residents are classified as noncitizen American "nationals."

Trump signed the executive order the day he returned to the White House in January 2025, making the issue a central part of his administration's effort to curtail immigration to the United States and crack down on immigrants living in the country unlawfully. When the high court considered the issue in April, Trump became the first sitting president in U.S. history to attend oral arguments, underscoring the case's importance.

Lower courts had consistently ruled against the president, whose administration appealed the case until it reached the Supreme Court. At oral arguments, Solicitor General D. John Sauer made the case that the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States and "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," shouldn't apply to children whose parents were in the country unlawfully or temporarily.

That argument asked the justices to reinterpret the 1898 case of a man named Wong Kim Ark, who was born to Chinese parents in San Francisco at a time before current U.S. immigration laws existed. At the time, the court ruled that Wong was a U.S. citizen because his parents had established "domicile" in the United States and his "allegiance" was thus to his country of birth, not to the Chinese emperor.

Sauer urged the court to consider that "we're in a new world now, where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who's a U.S. citizen." The chief justice responded that while the world has changed, "it's the same Constitution."

Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Seattle, the top Democrat on the House's immigration subcommittee, called the president's executive order "yet another piece of his anti-immigrant, xenophobic agenda."

"Donald Trump is not a king, and he cannot, with the stroke of a pen, change our Constitution," Jayapal said in a statement. "Today's ruling rightly reaffirms that if you are born in America, you are American, plain and simple."

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a statement that people born on U.S. soil are citizens and added, "Today they no longer have to worry about an administration who tried to deny them this right."

Trump and his GOP allies in Congress aren't giving up.

In posts on his Truth Social platform Tuesday morning, Trump downplayed the significance of the birthright citizenship ruling while claiming a "BIG WIN" in two other cases, in which the court lifted limits on political spending and upheld Idaho and West Virginia laws banning transgender athletes from participating in girls' and women's sports. Later Tuesday, Trump posted that the court's ruling on birthright citizenship was "too bad for our Country" but said Congress could "easily make it up" through legislation.

"No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!" the president wrote. "Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship."

Baumgartner and the other Republican who represents Washington in Congress, Rep. Dan Newhouse of Sunnyside, have said they support restricting birthright citizenship through legislation. As of Tuesday, Baumgartner was one of 89 Republicans who had cosponsored such legislation in the House and nine GOP senators had backed the same bill in the Senate.

Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.

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