Reversal: Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to strike down President Trump’s directive limiting birthright citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for five justices that the 14th Amendment guarantees automatic citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States, with Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the Court’s three liberal justices joining. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment on statutory grounds, while Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch dissented and Justice Samuel Alito filed a separate dissent.

The decision upholds lower-court rulings blocking an executive order that would have denied citizenship to babies born in the U.S. when neither parent was a citizen or green‑card holder, including parents here illegally or on temporary visas. The Court reaffirmed that people born on U.S. soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ status, with narrow exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats, consistent with the 1898 Wong Kim Ark precedent. Babies born in the United States therefore remain citizens at birth despite a parent’s immigration status.

Kavanaugh wrote separately that a mid-20th century federal law independently guarantees birthright citizenship. Thomas’s 91-page dissent argued the Citizenship Clause covered only formerly enslaved people and their descendants, a reading Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson criticized in her own writing. The order, issued on Trump’s first day back in office, had been projected to affect up to 250,000 births a year and force many families to document their newborns’ citizenship.

AI-synthesized from multiple reported sources