The Supreme Court stops Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship
Justices ruled 6–3 against Trump’s effort to gut the 14th Amendment.
Justices ruled 6–3 against Trump’s effort to gut the 14th Amendment.
by Jun 30, 2026, 2:44 PM UTC
Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images
Gaby Del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge covering surveillance, the Department of Homeland Security, and the tech-right.
The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, ruling 6-3 against President Donald Trump’s effort to end the longstanding constitutional right via executive order.
Birthright citizenship dates back to Reconstruction. Under the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship and equal protection to the children of formerly enslaved people, anyone born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a citizen.
Trump issued the executive order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” just hours after being sworn back into office in early 2025 — and the administration was almost immediately sued in response. Defending the executive order before the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. Sauer argued that noncitizens and their children aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, since their loyalty lies with a foreign power.
An estimated 250,000 children are born on US soil to noncitizen parents each year. The birthright citizenship ban would not have gone into effect retroactively, but would have applied to anyone born 30 days after Trump’s executive order was issued.
Even conservative justices were skeptical of the administration’s argument. After Sauer claimed that the 14th Amendment needs to be revisited because we live in a different world than that of Reconstruction, Justice Neil Gorsuch countered: “it’s the same Constitution.” Still, the fact that such a fundamental constitutional right was up for debate shows just how much Trump’s nativist vision has affected American politics.
Gorsuch ultimately caved, not only signing onto Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion but also writing one of his own. Justice Samuel Alito also dissented.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh signed onto the majority opinion, issued by Chief Justice John Roberts, but also wrote a partial dissent. For Kavanaugh, the issue wasn’t that Trump flouted the 14th Amendment — in fact, Kavanaugh claims he didn’t — but that the executive order violated the Nationality Act of 1940 and subsequent Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, both of which mirror the language of the 14th Amendment. “The constitutional issue,” Kavanaugh wrote in his partial dissent, “is not straightforward, much as we want it to be.”
Kavanaugh noted that in 1898, the Supreme Court determined that there are four groups of people who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and are therefore ineligible for birthright citizenship: “children of foreign sovereigns, or their ministers, or born on foreign public ships, or of enemies within and during a hostile occupation of part of our territory,” as well as the “children of members of the Indian tribes.”
But he sees no reason why the category can’t be expanded to keep up with the changing times, just as the court has previously extended 1st Amendment protections to the online speech, even though there was no internet in the 18th century. Kavanaugh suggested that Congress could overturn birthright citizenship, indicating that the fight for the 14th amendment may not be over yet.
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