Nearly a year and a half after it was signed, President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship order is dead. The Supreme Court struck it down Tuesday in Trump v. Barbara, and Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion.
The timeline shows how long the order sat in limbo. Trump signed it Jan. 20, 2025. It was supposed to start 30 days later and never did. Several federal judges blocked enforcement, and in a separate case last spring the Supreme Court ruled 6-3, in Trump v. CASA, that lower courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions.
That did not rescue the order. A federal judge in New Hampshire, Joseph Laplante, issued a preliminary injunction on July 10 protecting a class of babies born after Feb. 20, 2025. The administration went to the Supreme Court on Sept. 26. The justices took the case Dec. 5 and heard it April 1.
The holding
Roberts and the majority sided with the challengers, as every lower court that looked at the question had. The order, they said, cannot be squared with the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to anyone “born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Children of parents who are here unlawfully or temporarily “satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause,” Roberts wrote. “Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
He also dismissed the government’s fallback argument. Lawyers for the administration had said the amendment’s drafters cared about “primary allegiance,” tied to domicile. Roberts called that a “dramatically revisionist view” with “scant evidence” behind it.
His closing paragraph was short. Citizenship “was the right to have rights,” he wrote, and the Framers extended that promise to “every free-born person in this land.” Then: “We keep that promise today.”
Precedent
Roberts anchored the ruling in an 1898 case, Wong Kim Ark. Wong was born in San Francisco to parents of Chinese descent. In 1895, after a visit to China, immigration officials turned him away on the ground that he was not a citizen. The court disagreed in 1898, and Roberts noted that in the 128 years since, the justices have read the rule to cover all children born in the country and subject to its power.
The Fourteenth Amendment itself dates to 1868. Roberts described it as a repudiation of Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 decision that left a Black man without access to federal courts because he was not a citizen.
Not unanimous
Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order is invalid, but he rested that on a federal statute, not the Constitution. Congress, he wrote, could change the statute to carve out exceptions, “But Congress has not yet done so.”
Justice Samuel Alito dissented and called the decision “a serious mistake.” Justice Clarence Thomas, with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining, wrote a longer dissent calling the majority’s history “not historically accurate.” Gorsuch also filed his own brief dissent raising questions about the domicile of undocumented parents who intend to stay.
