The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled against President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally. The court held those children remain citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.
The ruling is a major defeat for one of Trump’s signature immigration policies — an order he signed on the first day of his second term in January 2025 and had campaigned against for more than a decade. The order never took effect; every federal court that reviewed it had struck it down.
The case, Trump v. Barbara, grew out of a class action suit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other rights groups, including the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, on behalf of families whose children’s citizenship was thrown into doubt.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 after the Civil War, guarantees citizenship to “all persons born… in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” That provision was adopted to overturn the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to people of African descent.
The Trump administration argued children born to undocumented or temporarily present parents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” in the full legal sense, and so are not automatically citizens. That echoed a theory the Supreme Court rejected in 1898 in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held nearly all children born on U.S. soil are citizens, aside from narrow exceptions like children of foreign diplomats.
During April oral arguments, which Trump attended in person, several conservative justices sounded skeptical. Chief Justice John Roberts called the government’s reasoning “quirky,” remarking at one point that “it’s a new world, but it’s the same Constitution.” Tuesday’s decision affirms more than a century of precedent and ensures those children keep automatic citizenship and the rights to a Social Security number, passport and other benefits.
