The decision delivered a sharp response to President Trump's arguments that children born to parents illegally in the U.S. were not American citizens.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday delivered a critical ruling, one that has been anticipated for quite some time. In the case of Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Donald Trump's Executive Order 14160 was, in fact, unconstitutional.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, who together held that the order violates the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment but on different grounds, writing separately that he viewed the order as conflicting with federal immigration law rather than the Constitution itself. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented, with Thomas and Gorsuch joining one dissenting opinion and Alito filing his own.
In his opinion, Roberts wrote that the text of the Fourteenth Amendment offers no support for limiting citizenship based on a parent's immigration status. He noted that terms central to the executive order — including references to a child's mother, father, and lawful or temporary status — appear nowhere in the amendment's language, concluding that the framers considered such distinctions irrelevant to the constitutional guarantee. Read the full opinion here.
The ruling brings to a close a legal fight that began on Trump's first day back in office. On January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14160, directing federal agencies to stop recognizing automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who were undocumented or present on a temporary basis. Every federal court that reviewed the order before it could take effect found it unconstitutional and blocked its enforcement.
The case's path to the Supreme Court was shaped in part by an earlier ruling. In June 2025, the Court decided Trump v. CASA, which restricted the ability of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions. In response, the ACLU filed a class-action lawsuit, Barbara v. Trump, seeking to protect affected children through a certified nationwide class rather than a broad injunction. A federal district court in New Hampshire granted that request, and the case was eventually taken up directly by the Supreme Court.
At the center of the dispute was the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment's merely 5-word phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." The Trump administration argued that this language implicitly required a parent to be lawfully domiciled in the United States for a child to qualify for birthright citizenship, pointing to the Court's 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Attorneys for the plaintiffs countered that Wong Kim Ark had already settled the question, holding that citizenship extends to virtually all children born on U.S. soil regardless of their parents' status. During oral arguments in April, several justices expressed skepticism toward the administration's reading of the earlier case, foreshadowing Tuesday's outcome.
President Trump attended those oral arguments in person, becoming the first sitting president to do so. The ruling marks the second major setback for his second-term agenda at the Supreme Court this year, following a separate decision in February striking down a number of his administration's tariffs.
With the decision, birthright citizenship remains in place as it has been understood for more than a century: children born in the United States are American citizens at birth, regardless of their parents' immigration status.
