The U.S. Supreme Court voted 5-4 on Tuesday to reject President Donald Trump’s reform of the nation’s birthright citizenship policy, which now grants the huge prize of citizenship to nearly all infants born in the United States, even if the parents are illegal migrants or temporary visitors.
The long 194-page Trump v. Barbara decision says Trump’s order violates the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
The decision was 6 to 3 against Trump, but Justice Brett Kavanaugh argued that Trump and other politicians can change the rule via legislation.
“Citizenship, then and now,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, “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.”
The right applies even to foreign parents who sneak across the United States borders with Canada and Mexico, or who enter as temporary workers or tourists, Roberts insisted.
The decision forces Trump and pro-American politicians to step up border controls to exclude more migrants seeking to snatch citizenship slices from Americans. Democrats and business groups, however, will resist such controls because they favor migration.
Alternatively, pro-American politicians and voters can try the near-impossible task of amending the Constitution via votes in a two-thirds majority of state legislatures.
In January 2025, Trump rejected the claim that nearly all births on U.S soil count for citizenship:
the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.
The older practice made sense in the 1800s when the United States was far more isolated by geography from competing foreign nations and cultures. Those barriers have largely been eliminated by aircraft and mass electronic media.
But the continuation of the loose policy has been used by many foreigners to grab slices of Americans’ citizenship for their children — and eventually, for themselves via naturalization as parents of a citizen — by entering the country before childbirth, either via temporary work and tourist visas or by illegal entry.
Millions of infants with no parental connection to the United States have gained citizenship via this route, much to the advantage of the Democratic Party, various business interests, as well as foreign governments, such as those of China and India.
Each such arrival has taken political power and civic clout from ordinary Americans, especially from Americans living in coastal cities or along the Texas border. Those births have helped shift political and cultural power leftward, often toward a direct rejection of Americans’ free-speaking, independent culture.
For example, Zohran Mamdani’s election victory in migrant-crowded New York is difficult to imagine without the loose policy of birthright citizenship.