US Supreme Court rules against Trump order to end birthright citizenship
By Al Jazeera, June 30, 2026The United States Supreme Court has ruled against US President Donald Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship for all individuals born on US soil.
The 6-3 ruling represents a major blow to Trump and his effort to transform immigration in the US. Upon taking office on January 20, 2025, Trump had signed an executive order seeking to bar those born in the US to parents on temporary legal statuses or without documentation from automatically receiving US citizenship.
The nine-panel Supreme Court’s ruling upholds a lower court’s determination that Trump’s order ran counter to the US constitution, as well as a subsequent Supreme Court decision on the matter.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts traced the US practice of birthright citizenship to English common law, through the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 and the Supreme Court’s 1898 ruling in the United States v Wong Kim Ark.
In his opinion, he said Trump administration lawyers and dissenting Supreme Court justices had offered insufficient evidence in its reinterpretation of longstanding law.
“The trouble is that there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view,” he wrote.
“The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,” he wrote. “We keep that
promise today.”
Judicial limits upheld ruling
Trump did not immediately respond to the ruling, but earlier in the day he posted an article on his Truth Social arguing Congress could pass legislation changing birthright citizenship, although there is little evidence there would be anything close to the political will among lawmakers to do so.
Following the ruling, legal experts noted that the decision effectively settles a long-running constitutional debate over birthright citizenship, reaffirming more than a century of precedent dating back to the 1898 case United States v Wong Kim Ark.