Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said the Fourteenth Amendment enshrined citizenship as a fundamental constitutional right.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote, adding that the amendment extended that guarantee to “every free-born person in this land.”
Three conservative justices dissented, arguing that Trump’s executive order should have been allowed to take effect. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a lengthy dissent, said the court had wrongly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment beyond its original purpose, which he argued was to secure equal rights for formerly enslaved Black Americans.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority in rejecting Trump’s order but based his decision on existing federal statute rather than the Constitution. He agreed with the dissenters that the executive order did not violate the Constitution itself, indicating that Congress could amend federal law in the future to alter birthright citizenship rules.

Trump’s executive order, signed on the first day of his second presidential term, was a central element of his administration’s broader immigration agenda. The policy had been blocked by several lower federal courts and never took effect anywhere in the United States while legal challenges proceeded.

The case reached the Supreme Court after the administration appealed a ruling by a federal court in New Hampshire that declared the order unlawful.
The administration argued that children born to parents who were in the United States unlawfully or temporarily were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and therefore were not automatically entitled to citizenship.

The majority rejected that interpretation, relying on the amendment’s text, its historical context and the Supreme Court’s landmark 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which established that children born in the United States to foreign nationals are citizens by birth.

Legal experts estimate that more than 250,000 children born annually in the United States would have been affected by the executive order. The proposed restrictions would have applied not only to undocumented immigrants but also to individuals legally residing in the country on temporary visas, including students and applicants for permanent residency.

The ruling marks one of the most significant judicial setbacks for Trump’s immigration agenda during his second term and reaffirms more than a century of constitutional precedent governing citizenship by birth.