Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump’s proposed limits

WASHINGTON (AP) — A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

By a 6-3 vote, the court struck down Trump’s order. A bare majority of five justices, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, held that the long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, makes anyone born in the country a citizen, with very limited exceptions.

“Citizenship, then and 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,’” Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment. “We keep that promise today.”

A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, disagreed about the constitutional ruling but pointed to a federal law that he said broadly conveys birthright citizenship.

Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas would have upheld Trump’s proposed restrictions.

“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Thomas wrote in a 91-page dissent, more than three times as long as Roberts’ opinion. “In doing so, the Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.

During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.

The case framed another test of Trump’s assertions of executive power — assertions that defy long-standing precedent — before a court with a conservative majority and a robust view of presidential power that has largely ruled in his favor. In the notable exceptions when the court has not, Trump has responded with starkly personal criticisms of the justices.

The justices ruled on Trump’s appeal of a lower-court ruling from New Hampshire that struck down the citizenship restrictions.

The birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown.

Marylanders said they were relieved by the ruling.

Donna Batkis, a bilingual psychotherapist and licensed clinical social worker in the Baltimore region who frequently works with immigrants, stepped out of a meeting in tears of happiness and relief.

The news, she said, punched her in the stomach.

“It’s been such hell for so many people,” she said. “Women have been under so much stress, arrests in their pregnancies. It’s been horrible. It’s caused all sorts of problems. This is wonderful.”

The ruling will reduce fear, save families and preserve dignity and hope of all Americans, Batkis said.

Most of Lutherville-based attorney Maria Colon’s clients are parents of children born in the U.S.

Colon said she has witnessed “the fear and uncertainty so many immigrant families have endured in recent months.”

Today’s Supreme Court decision provides “much needed stability and hope” to families and reaffirms that constitutional rights “must be preserved, even during times of significant legal and political change,” she said.

Shana Khader, deputy legal director for We Are CASA, the largest immigrant advocacy organization in Maryland, called the ruling a “historic victory” and a crucial check on presidential power.

“The Supreme Court has reaffirmed what generations of children and families have known to be true: citizenship is a constitutional guarantee,” Khader said in a statement. “No president has the authority to unilaterally rewrite the Constitution or decide which babies count as citizens and which do not.”

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Baltimore-based refugee resettlement organization Global Refuge, said in an emailed statement that the 14th Amendment is “stronger than the forces trying to hollow it out.”

“Somewhere today, a baby will be born in an American hospital to immigrant parents. That baby is a citizen. Not conditionally, not provisionally, and certainly not at the discretion of any president,” she said.

Susana Barrios, vice president of Latinos United Network for Advocacy, was expecting the worst with today’s decision. Her organization helps to reunite people with deported loved ones.

Many immigrant families weren’t waiting for word from the court, she said.

“I think most people had not been paying attention, so much more is going on.”

This past week, Barrios worked with an immigrant family whose father was recently deported. Their son was beaten and left paralyzed a couple of years ago, leaving his mother to care for him. The family has decided to leave the country because she can’t survive without her husband, Barrios said.

“I have learned to focus on the local issues to keep my sanity,” Barrios said. “We have families being separated every day, so we have to help them figure out next steps.”

Birthright citizenship was the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. The justices previously struck down global tariffs that Trump had imposed under an emergency powers law that had never been used in that way.

Trump reacted furiously to the late-February tariff decision, saying he was ashamed of the justices who ruled against him and calling them unpatriotic.

He seemed to recognize that the court was likely to rule against him on birthright citizenship. He used his Truth Social platform to criticize “dumb judges and justices” and wealthy pregnant women from China and elsewhere who come to the U.S. to give birth so their newborns will have American citizenship.

Trump’s order would have upended widely held views that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born in the U.S., excluding only the children of foreign diplomats and those born to a foreign occupying force.

The amendment was intended to ensure that Black people, including formerly enslaved people, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly. “All 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,” it reads.

In a series of decisions, lower courts have struck down Trump’s executive order as illegal. The decisions have invoked the high court’s 1898 ruling in Wong Kim Ark, which held that the U.S.-born child of Chinese nationals was a citizen.

Roberts, joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the three liberal justices, said the amendment’s language, the historical context and the 1898 case make clear that children born to parents who were in the U.S. illegally or temporarily “are citizens at birth.”

But there was only a bare majority of five justices on the constitutional question.

Kavanaugh sided with the majority because of a federal law that makes those children citizens. But he joined the dissenters in finding that Trump’s order does not violate the Constitution. Kavanaugh’s view would enable a future Congress to change the law to restrict birthright citizenship.

The Trump administration argued that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.

More than 250,000 babies born in the U.S. each year would have been affected by the executive order, according to research by the Migration Policy Institute and Pennsylvania State University’s Population Research Institute.

While Trump has largely focused on illegal immigration in his rhetoric and actions, the birthright citizenship restrictions would also have applied to people who are legally present in the United States, including students and applicants for green cards or permanent resident status.