The US Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump’s effort to strip automatic citizenship from some children born in the United States, ruling that his executive order could not stand. In a 6-3 decision, the court left in place lower-court blocks on the move that would have denied citizenship to babies born on US soil when neither parent was a US citizen or permanent resident.
Trump quickly responded on Truth Social, saying the court had upheld birthright citizenship and that Congress could fix the matter with a law. That makes today’s ruling more than a legal setback; it is also a direct invitation from the president to take the fight to lawmakers, even as the constitutional rule the court invoked has stood for more than a century.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion and said the Trump administration’s reading of the XIV Amendment had no basis. He wrote that citizenship was, then as now, the right to have rights, and he relied on the 1898 precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Roberts also wrote, “Today we keep that promise.”
The case exposed a split inside the court even as the outcome stayed the same. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the result but rejected Roberts’s constitutional reasoning, saying the order ran first into federal citizenship law. That difference matters because it leaves Trump’s team with a narrower route if it wants to keep pressing the issue: a statute from Congress would have to confront a constitutional precedent the court has now reaffirmed, not simply the executive order it struck down.
Rob Bonta, who backed the challenge, spoke after the ruling and framed it as a hard stop on Trump’s attempt to rewrite the rule of birthright citizenship by decree. The decision came on the same day the court also cleared bans on transgender athletes in girls’ sports and removed a long-standing limit on coordinated funding between parties and candidates, but the citizenship ruling landed as one of the sharpest defeats Trump has taken from the court in his second presidency. The justices had already dealt him another setback in February over global tariffs, and today’s result shows the White House still cannot use executive power alone to erase a rule tied to the Constitution, unless Congress passes a law that survives that same constitutional test.
