Supreme Court Issues Crucial Ruling on Trump's Fight Against Birthright Citizenship

The Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship on Friday, June 27, making the decision not to block universal injunctions against President Donald Trump’s attempted citizenship restrictions.

The ruling was 6-3, with the court’s six conservative justices agreeing and its three liberal judges dissenting.

The decision means that lower courts will not have the authority to block President Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship. The ruling effectively lifts the national pause that was placed on Trump’s order to end birthright citizenship, which he signed on the first day of his second presidential term as part of 26 executive orders.

Since 1868, the U.S. has followed the law of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which reads, “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.”

In his order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” Trump asserted that the 14th Amendment was only meant to rectify the racist ruling in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case, which concluded that Black Americans were not citizens. The amendment, Trump’s order claimed, has since been misinterpreted “to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

The order then laid out new restrictions for citizenship, stating:

Twenty-two states sued over Trump’s executive order, in addition to human rights groups, leading three different federal judges to issue universal injunctions that barred the administration from enforcing the new policy. The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

The crux of the arguments heard by the Supreme Court on March 15 was less about citizenship and more about who has the power to change a law and enforce that change.

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Trump-appointed Solicitor General D. John Sauer opened his arguments by stating that the district court judges exceeded their authority under the Constitution by barring the enforcement of Trump’s order. Conservative Justice Samuel Alito agreed in part at the time, noting his concern about 680 district court judges across the country having the power to stop an executive order.

However, other justices argued that if judges cannot stop such an order, it allows a president like Trump — who, in this case, is attempting to rewrite the Constitution via executive order — to write laws attacking their political enemies without allowing any legal recourse.

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson addressed Sauer’s argument, saying, “The real concern, I think, is that your argument seems to turn our justice system, in my view at least, into a catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime from the standpoint of the executive, where everybody has to have a lawyer and file a lawsuit in order for the government to stop violating people’s rights. And I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

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Right-leaning Justice Brett Kavanaugh questioned Sauer on the simple matter of enforcing Trump’s order.

“On the day after it goes into effect — this is just a very practical question on how is it going to work — what do hospitals do with a newborn? What do states do with a newborn?” he asked.

“Federal officials will have to figure that out,” the solicitor general responded.

Again, Kavanaugh asked, “How?”

After suggesting that parents will have to prove their citizenship, but offering no details on how or when that might happen surrounding the birth of a child, Sauer admitted, “We just don’t know.”