Trump suffers major defeat as US Supreme Court protects birthright citizenship for migrants' children

The United States Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked President Donald Trump's attempt to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas, dealing his administration a major setback on one of its signature immigration policies.

Trump sought to end birthright citizenship through an executive order signed on January 20, 2025. Had it taken effect, the order would have ended the long-standing practice under which nearly everyone born on US soil is automatically recognised as an American citizen.

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court held that the executive order violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to people born in the country. The court reaffirmed that children born in the United States are citizens at birth, except in a handful of well-established exceptions.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said citizenship has long been regarded as a fundamental right in the United States.

“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.’ We keep that promise today,” Roberts wrote.

The three dissenting justices argued that Trump's executive order should have been upheld.

“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,” Justice Clarence Thomas, one of the three opposing judges, wrote.

“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 case was closely watched because it tested one of the Trump administration's most controversial immigration policies. Trump had argued that the constitutional guarantee of citizenship should not apply to children whose parents were in the country illegally or only temporarily.

Lower courts had previously blocked the executive order, ruling that it conflicted with both the Constitution and decades of legal precedent on birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court's decision now settles the issue, preserving automatic citizenship for children born in the United States under the existing constitutional framework.