US supreme court upholds birthright citizenship in blow to Trump agenda

US supreme court upholds birthright citizenship in blow to Trump agenda

The US supreme court has upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, affirming that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens and rejecting a central pillar of Donald Trump's anti-immigrant agenda.

The president had issued an executive order on the first day of his second term that sought to deny automatic citizenship to the children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said this order violated the 14th amendment of the US constitution.

"Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights - to freely participate in our political community," wrote Roberts. "The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land.' We keep that promise today."

Roberts was joined by the liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. The conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the judgment but dissented in part, arguing that the executive order violated federal law but not the constitution. The conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch filed dissenting opinions. The court's writings in the ruling span 194 pages, nearly 90 of which were written by Thomas in dissent, his longest in his tenure on the court.

Trump called the ruling "too bad for our Country", but said US Congress should now take up the matter legislatively, suggesting another avenue to keep the issue alive.

"No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship," Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform. "They will have my Complete and Total Support!"

The American Civil Liberties Union, whose national legal director, Cecillia Wang, argued the case before the supreme court, celebrated the ruling as a "major victory".

"The court's decision reaffirms a fundamental American promise - if you are born here, you are a citizen," Wang said. "A president cannot change the constitution by executive fiat."

Reactions on Capitol Hill split largely along partisan lines. Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic leader in the US House, noted that the 14th amendment "withstood the unconstitutional attack launched by Donald Trump and his most sycophantic and xenophobic enablers".

"On the eve of America's 250th birthday, the far-right Maga conservatives have failed in their quest to remake the United States, and American values have prevailed," Jeffries said.

Several Republicans expressed disappointment with the ruling.

"I do think that this has been grossly abused in recent years," Mike Johnson, the Republican speaker of the US House, said at a press conference. "You just come on to the soil and have your child, and then they're able to avail themselves of the welfare state and everything else."

Roberts writes that the "odious" decision in Dred Scott denied citizenship to Black people, arguing then that it was "blood, not soil" that decided citizenship. The 1857 decision was reversed by the 14th amendment.

"Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are 'subject to the jurisdiction' of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause," the majority writes.

In her concurring opinion, the liberal justice Jackson writes that the 14th amendment's "universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim - one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright".

Thomas, however, writes in his sprawling dissent that Black people were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans with "no other homeland" or allegiance to other nations. The same is not true, he writes, "for the children of foreign temporary visitors".

Roberts rejected the government's argument that the key question was whether a child owed "primary allegiance" to the United States, which in turn hinged on "domicile". As an initial matter, Roberts said, there is "scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view".