Supreme Court to Review Trump Executive Order on Birthright Citizenship

President Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 stating that the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The order would deny citizenship to the vast majority of children born to parents present in the country illegally or temporarily, affecting roughly 250,000 children per year.

A lower court blocked the order, and the case is now before the Supreme Court.

The first line of the 14th Amendment states that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. University of Virginia law professor Amanda Frost stated that birthright citizenship applies to everyone born in the United States regardless of parentage, with narrow exceptions for children of diplomats and invading occupying armies.

Frost said there is no ambiguity about the constitutional issue.

A Pew Research Center poll found 50 percent of Americans say citizenship should be granted at birth to children of undocumented immigrants and 49 percent say no. The Supreme Court first addressed citizenship in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that no Black person, whether enslaved or free, could be a citizen of the United States.

After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to make clear that all four million formerly enslaved people were citizens and that children of immigrants would also be citizens. In 1895, Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco to Chinese parents, was denied re-entry to the United States under the Chinese Exclusion Act.