Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship

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 country illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.

By a six to three 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 a citizen of anyone born in the country, 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 Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the US. Trump said the decision was “too bad for our country” and wrongly suggested that Congress could “easily” address it with legislation. The majority decision rests on constitutional grounds. It would take an amendment to overcome the decision. 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 birthright citizenship order, which Trump signed on the first day of his second term, is part of his administration’s broad immigration crackdown. Birthright citizenship was the first Trump immigration-related policy to reach the court for a final ruling. Trump’s order would have upended widely held views that the 14th Amendment confers citizenship on everyone born in the US, 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 former slaves, had citizenship, though the Citizenship Clause is written more broadly.

“All persons born or naturalised 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. The Trump administration had argued that the common view of citizenship is wrong, asserting that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US and therefore are not entitled to citizenship.

More than one-quarter of a million babies born in the US 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.