Divided Supreme Court affirms birthright citizenship

Supporters of birthright citizenship rally in front of Supreme Court

(Image credit: Mehmet Eser / Anadolu via Getty Images)

What happened

The Supreme Court Tuesday ruled that President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship violated the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, upholding the long-established principle that most people born on U.S. soil are automatically citizens. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the five-justice majority but said he would have struck down Trump’s order as a narrower legislative violation. Justice Samuel Alito said, in one of three dissents, that the ruling was a “serious mistake” in “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, handed Trump a “huge loss on one of his top priorities” on the final day of the Supreme Court’s term, CNN said. Trump’s executive order “would have applied to people who are legally in the United States” and affected “more than one-quarter of a million babies,” The Associated Press said. But it “never went into effect,” The New York Times said, “and there were few signs the administration had been preparing the dramatic overhaul of the citizenship system” that would have been needed.

Trump might have fared better if he had “tried to end birthright citizenship for transients alone,” The Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. But “he took the advice of those who recommended an expansive constitutional challenge because he thought the issue was a political winner, and his defeat is all the greater for it.”

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