US Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship: Who wins, who loses?

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In a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday, the court rejected an executive order signed by Trump shortly after taking office in January 2025, which barred those born in the US to parents on temporary legal statuses or without documentation from automatically receiving US citizenship. Ahead of the July 4 holiday marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, the court’s ruling reaffirmed what it means to be a US citizen, however – a principle grounded in the 14th Amendment of 1868 in the aftermath of the civil war, which ended the practice of slavery in the US. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, hailed the US practice of birthright citizenship. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land’,” he wrote. “We keep that promise today.” In line with his hardline anti-immigration agenda, Trump’s executive order stated that if one parent is “unlawfully present in the United States” and the other is not a citizen or a “lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth”, the child cannot claim birthright. It added that if a parent’s presence in the country is “lawful but temporary” through a tourist, student or work visa and the other parent is not a US citizen, birthright citizenship cannot be passed on to the child. Birthright citizenship grants automatic US citizenship to babies born in the country, no matter their parents’ status, drawing on the English common law principle of “jus soli”, or “right of the soil”. This is opposed to the “jus sanguinis”, or “right of blood”, which stipulates that the nationality of a child is determined by that of the parents, regardless of the location of birth. Trump repeatedly argued that birthright citizenship “ripped off” taxpayers by allowing undocumented migrants to take advantage of the US welfare state. Lawyers for the administration argued in court that the practice had been based on a “misreading” of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”. US Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the administration, argued that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” automatically precluded some immigrant groups from birthright citizenship, and that it should apply only to those with “allegiance to the United States by virtue of domicile”. Sauer also argued that granting citizenship to any baby born on US soil had led to what he termed “birth tourism”, or the arrival of “uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations” who aimed to secure citizenship for their children. Trump called the Supreme Court’s ruling “too bad for our country” and suggested there may be other avenues to pursue the same goal, such as for Republicans in Congress to pass legislation that limits who qualifies for citizenship at birth. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship,” Trump wrote. “They will have my Complete and Total Support!” The case against birthright has been of high importance for the Trump administration ahead of the November midterm elections. Trump attended the court’s oral arguments in early April, becoming the first sitting president to do so in an active case before the Supreme Court. He was seen barging out in the middle of the hearing shortly before writing on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!” The White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, said the ruling was “destructive and outrageous”. “American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only ⁠and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration,” he wrote on X. Miller told Al Jazeera that the Trump administration will continue “fighting” to end birthright citizenship in spite of the ruling. Rainer Baubock, a lecturer at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, said that while the ruling comes as no surprise, it is significant because it “preserves an inclusive conception of the American polity that includes the children born to undocumented migrants”. Baubock said future legislation will be unlikely to change that. “By deciding to entrench an obvious and literal interpretation of the Constitution, it seems [the court] closed any road for the Republican majority in Congress to restrict birthright citizenship in ordinary legislation,” the analyst told Al Jazeera. “It would thus take a constitutional amendment and the chances for this to pass are practically zero.” Nando Sigona, a lecturer on migration at the University of Birmingham, said: “Unless Congress were to pursue the extraordinarily difficult route of a constitutional amendment, which requires broad bipartisan support, legislation alone would almost certainly face immediate constitutional challenges,” he added. A joint study by Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Pennsylvania State University in May 2025 predicted that an estimated 255,000 babies a year would be born in the US without citizenship, increasing the undocumented population by 2.7 million by 2045, if Trump’s executive order had succeeded. The Pennsylvania State University estimated that Latino immigrants would be the most affected by the policy change, counting for more than 90 percent of US-born people without legal status by 2050. The Asian population would experience the largest relative growth of any other immigrant group, with 41 “unauthorised” births per 1,000 Asians without legal status, compared with 17 births per 1,000 Latinos without legal status, according to the university. Aside from the affected communities, the ruling also appears to benefit the US economy. The Center for Migration Studies (CMS) estimated that beneficiaries of birthright citizenship will have contributed $7.7 trillion to the US economy through their income between 1975 and 2074. Sigona said the ruling was significant as it reaffirms that the Constitution – rather than the executive power – defines the boundaries of American citizenship. “By upholding birthright citizenship, the court reaffirmed a longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment dating back more than a century and rejected an attempt to redefine constitutional rights through executive action,” Sigona told Al Jazeera. “More broadly, it signals that even in today’s highly polarised political climate, there remain constitutional limits on presidential authority over immigration.” Culturally, it is also important to view the wider debate about birthright citizenship through the lens of each country’s unique history, Shaw said. In the US’s case, “the 14th amendment needs to be seen in the light of the civil war being fought substantially around slavery”, the analyst said. The 14th amendment was ratified in 1868 to codify the rights of Black Americans. Until then, the descendants of enslaved people were not considered to be US citizens but a separate class of people. The amendment reversed that, extending the right to citizenship to “all persons born or naturalised in the United States”. Changing this basic tenet, which is seen by many as woven into US identity and culture, has therefore been controversial. According to a Pew Research Center survey, 56 percent of US adults were against Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, while 43 percent were supportive. According to the Pew Research Center, at least 30 other countries have similar rights to the US on birthright citizenship, including Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Argentina. Jo Shaw, head of school at Edinburgh Law School in the UK, said a substantial number of Latin American countries have a very similar arrangement to the US. The lecturer, who co-authored a study for the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on the topic of birthright in Latin America, said each individual country, however, has its particular framework of constitution, legislative measures and scope of executive action. Chile and Colombia, for instance, differ from the US in that they do not extend this constitutional right to “transient foreigners” or “foreigners in transit”. “In the light of 21st century migration practices, it is clear that these provisions can have severely exclusionary effects, depending upon how they are used by national legislatures and executives, and how ‘transient’ is interpreted,” Shaw told Al Jazeera. 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