The Latest: Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, rejecting Trump’s restrictions
The Supreme Court on Tuesday upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The decision, in line with the longstanding judicial interpretation of the 14th Amendment, comes on the final day of a Supreme Court term that has centered on Trump’s expansive claims of presidential power — and largely ruled in his favor.
In its other Tuesday rulings, the court upheld laws in roughly half the states that prohibit transgender girls and women from playing on their public school and college sport teams and struck down limits on party spending in federal elections.
Here's the latest:
Mark Krikorian, a prominent Washington voice favoring restrictive immigration policies, said he expects the ruling to result in new U.S. visa applications, with potential visitors being asked if they are pregnant.
“It’s something that visa officers are often reluctant to ask about — it’s awkward,” said Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“But if it’s on the application then you have the answers, and if you lie you’ve committed a felony,” he said.
The Trump administration says birthright citizenship has created what it calls a birth tourism industry.
“It is unacceptable for foreign parents to use a U.S. tourist visa for the primary purpose of giving birth in the United States to obtain citizenship for the child,” the State Department said in a post on X. “Those who abuse our immigration system through birth tourism may be ineligible for future visas or travel to the United States.”
He insists the majority opinion perpetuates a misunderstanding and misapplication of the 14th amendment.
The citizenship clause and related Reconstruction statutes granted citizenship “to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race,” he wrote. But “neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”
He continued: “Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority.”
That highlights the argument over what it means to be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S.
The majority holds that, with exceptions like foreign diplomats, being on U.S. soil makes a person subject to U.S. laws. Thomas and dissenters reason that no one who is separately subject to another foreign government should be considered “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., at least when conferring citizenship.
Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the birthright case argued the 14th amendment’s citizenship clause applied only to formerly enslaved people and not more broadly.
That prompted Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to pen a concurrence to Roberts’ majority opinion.
“Despite his longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution, Justice Thomas now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure, relating only to ‘freed slaves such as Dred Scott,’” she wrote, calling that a “narrow vision” of Reconstruction’s intended expansion of democracy.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson wrote. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
Jackson is the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court. Thomas is the second Black man, succeeding Thurgood Marshall, who argued the Brown v. Board case that struck down segregated schools.
The president said the Supreme Court’s decision upholding that anyone born in the United States automatically becomes an American citizen was “too bad for our Country,” but that Congress could “easily” address it with legislation.
Trump declared that “No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!”
But the Supreme Court’s ruling Tuesday makes it clear that it would be necessary to amend the Constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the opinion for the court, pointed to the Fourteenth Amendment in the Constitution in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
The Justice Department said in a statement that it’s “committed to tackling illegal birth tourism schemes by working diligently with U.S. Attorneys across the country to uphold the law.”
“Actors seeking to exploit loopholes to obtain automatic citizenship for their children pose a national security threat and will be brought to justice,” the department said in a post on X.
U.S. Supreme Court justices have long distanced themselves from the pre-Civil War decision that declared Black people — enslaved and free — were not U.S. citizens.
The 1857 Dred Scott case was featured again Tuesday, being mentioned 48 times in 194 pages of the birthright citizenship opinion, concurrences and dissents.
Roberts’ majority opinion explained how U.S. birthright citizenship originates with English common law: Anyone born in the monarch’s realm was considered a “natural-born subject.”
The “odious” Scott case, Roberts said, deviated from that once-accepted understanding and “was met with shock.”
In response, he detailed, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause restored common law understanding, with lawmakers making clear they were explicitly rebuking the Scott decision.
Yet, Roberts wrote, “the Government and the principal dissent propose a return to its core tenet,” that “for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship.”
The Supreme Court’s public information office is denying a published report, since retracted, that the court announced Alito’s retirement Tuesday.
The unusual statement followed a story from NPR saying the court had announced that Alito was stepping down. NPR pulled the story a short time later. Chief Justice John Roberts announced the retirement of several court employees Tuesday, as he customarily does after the court’s final opinions are out. Alito was not among them.
Speculation had swirled about the justice’s future plans earlier this year, but Fox News and CBS reported this spring that he planned to remain on the bench.
NPR’s editor-in-chief released a statement saying the story had been incorrectly reported and that correspondent Nina Totenberg would appear on “All Things Considered” Tuesday afternoon to explain what had happened.
A Supreme Court that has expanded gun rights will consider whether bans on semiautomatic rifles, often called assault weapons, violate the Second Amendment.
The justices said Tuesday they will take up appeals asking the court to strike down bans on the AR-15 and similar semiautomatic firearms in the Chicago area and Connecticut.
Similar laws are in place in about a dozen states, covering major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Congress allowed a national assault weapons ban to expire in 2004, but Democrats have supported renewing it in response to a series of mass shootings and states have continued to pass their own laws.
The cases are the latest high-profile disputes over guns to reach the court since its conservative majority handed down a landmark ruling in 2022 that expanded Second Amendment rights and spawned challenges to firearm laws around the country.
The case is expected to be heard in the fall.
The conservative-leaning Institute for Free Speech hailed the decision as “a landmark victory for the First Amendment.”
“More than half the states have operated for years without restricting coordinated party expenditures, and there is no evidence of the corruption the federal government fears,” institute senior attorney Brett Nolan said. “The Court corrected a two-decade-old mistake.”
Meanwhile, Jacquelyn Lopez and Rachel Jacobs, partners in the Elias Law Group, which represents Democrats in voting rights cases and election contests, said the decision “needlessly” destroyed “a long-standing pillar” of federal campaign finance laws.
However, they also said Republicans have “pushed the boundaries” of the limits to help weak candidates. They said the Elias Law Group had anticipated the outcome for months.
“In the long run, Democratic campaigns will benefit from the level playing field this ruling provides,” they said. “Now, both parties are free to offer unlimited support to their candidates, not just the party willing to ignore the law to do so.”
Norman Wong, the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, the Chinese American cook at the center of the landmark 1898 Supreme Court decision establishing birthright citizenship, applauded Tuesday’s ruling.
“My great grandfather, Wong Kim Ark, never set out to become a symbol. He was one man, only a cook, and yet he stood up for what was right, and I believe that it has made a difference,” Wong said in a statement. “As a result, he stood up for the rights of all of us Americans — it just so happens that I am related to him. Today’s ruling shows that his victory remains as important now as it was in 1898.”
For a Mexican mother with six children born in the United States — ranging in age from 18 years to 18 months — the Supreme Court’s decision brought happiness.
“I am happy for our children,” the 38-year-old woman said in a telephone interview. “I am happy because they don’t face any risk like we do.”
The woman, who asked not to be identified for fear of being detained and deported, crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in 2007 in search of a better life. She has not applied for asylum or any other immigration status.
She works at a plant nursery in South Florida, where her children attend school.
The woman said one of her children called her as soon as he found out about the decision to share his joy with her.
“By the grace of God, the president does not manage to do everything he wants,” the mother said. “I was confident that, with God’s help, he would not succeed.”
The head of Global Refuge said the Supreme Court averted a catastrophe with its 6-3 opinion upholding the 14th Amendment and rejecting the Trump administration’s attempt to overturn a Reconstruction era amendment.
“Birthright citizenship survived the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, and today, it survived an executive order that would have essentially turned the maternity ward into a customs checkpoint,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, President and CEO of Global Refugee.
“The Justices rightly recognized that the U.S. Constitution is clear and unambiguous: if you are born in this country and subject to its jurisdiction, you are a citizen of this country,” she said. Vignarajah said a different outcome would have denied citizenship to more than 250,000 children born in the U.S. each year.
“This was a constitutional stress test.”
The president applauded a Supreme Court ruling that struck down a federal election law and made it easier for major donors to avoid caps on individual contributions to candidates by going through the party.
“A BIG WIN FOR REPUBLICANS and, more importantly, The First Amendment!” Trump posted on social media.
The Republican leader’s news conference was interrupted by the ruling as reporters instantly sought a real-time reaction.
“Oh dear,” Johnson said as a reporter read out the decision.
Johnson said he believes it will subject the country to “serious challenges going forward and we’ll have to deal with that.”
Johnson, who has worked as a constitutional lawyer primarily on religious issues, said the 14th Amendment is being abused by people who are coming to the U.S. to have children in a “birthing tourism trend.” It’s not illegal but is a practice the Trump administration has tried to reduce.
Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri called the Supreme Court’s decision “wrong, dangerous, and disastrous for American sovereignty and the American people.” He denounced the decision’s majority, including “squish conservatives,” in a post on X.
Schmitt added that Congress may need to act to restrict birthright citizenship following the court’s ruling.
“I will be announcing a forthcoming constitutional amendment to restore the sacred bond between American citizens and their government,” Schmitt wrote.
He said the amendment “will ensure that citizenship once again reflects allegiance, permanence, and membership in the American nation.”
“This decision confirms a truth that generations of Americans have lived by: a child born on this soil is a citizen of this nation,” Roman Palomares, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said in a statement. “The Court has made clear that no president can override the Constitution by decree.”
LULAC was one of the plaintiffs in the birthright citizenship case. The organization sued the Trump administration last year over the president’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
In her dissent on the West Virginia transgender athlete case, Sotomayor emphasized that Becky Pepper-Jackson, a 16-year-old high school sophomore, identified as a girl at a young age and started hormone therapy before going through puberty as a male.
That matters, Sotomayor said.
The justice did not argue that West Virginia could not set policies that set restrictions on transgender participation in girls’ sports to ensure safety and fairness. Such a policy, Sotomayor argued, could conceivably allow Pepper-Jackson to compete as she wishes. Meanwhile, the justice wrote, an absolute ban could violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
But the immediate issue, Sotomayor said, is that courts haven’t resolved the factual question of whether Pepper-Jackson’s circumstances put her on the same competitive level with other female athletes. Sotomayor said justices should have returned the case to lower courts to settle that question.
West Virginia Gov. Patrick Morrisey, a Republican, hailed Tuesday’s Supreme Court decision barring transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s sports, while the American Civil Liberties Union senior lawyer Joshua Block called it “heartbreaking.”
Morrisey said the decision “will be remembered as one of the most important victories for women’s athletics since the enactment of Title IX itself…We defended a simple principle most Americans instinctively understand: that women’s sports exist to provide women and girls a fair opportunity to compete and succeed.”
Block said: “The reality is that the equality of transgender women and girls takes nothing away from, and in fact promotes, the equality of all women and girls. We will continue to advance the fundamental principle that all young people deserve equal opportunity to thrive and succeed.”
Becky Pepper-Jackson is at the center of Supreme Court decision upholding states’ ban on transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports.
The teenager from Bridgeport, West Virginia, is a state-qualifying track and field athlete who placed third in the 2025 discus competition.
Six years ago, at age 11, Pepper-Jackson challenged a then-new state law banning trans athletes from competing in female sports in middle school, high school and college.
Now, in high school, Pepper-Jackson is the only trans person who’s sought to compete in girls sports in West Virginia.
Tuesday’s ruling means Pepper-Jackson’s recently completed track season will be her last in the state.
After President Trump took office for his second term, the Federal Election Commission dropped its defense of the law limiting party spending and joined with Republicans in urging that it be overturned.
Democrats had called on the court to uphold the law, even though there’s wide agreement that the spending limits have hurt political parties in an era of unlimited spending by other organizations.
Entrenched divisions between liberal and conservative justices over campaign finance restrictions were on display when the court heard arguments in December.
“Every time we interfere with the congressional design, we make matters worse,” said Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a dissenter in Citizens United and the court’s other campaign money cases.
By contrast, Justice Samuel Alito, a member of the Citizens United majority, described the decision as “much maligned, I think unfairly maligned.” The effect of the decision was to ”level the playing field,” Alito said, by expanding the right to spend freely that had previously belonged only to media companies.
“Birthright citizenship for children of illegal aliens will continue to be a ballooning negative consequence of the failure to enforce our immigration laws,” said Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “But that very fact makes it all the more urgent to step up enforcement to the maximum possible extent and end illegal immigration.”
The president has made his opposition to transgender athletes a key feature of his speeches and he embraced the Supreme Court decision that states can ban the athletes from girls and women’s teams.
“BIG WIN,” Trump said on social media. “Wow! That takes that ridiculous situation off the table!!!”
“The Justices rightly recognized that the U.S. Constitution is clear and unambiguous: if you are born in this country and subject to its jurisdiction, you are a citizen of this country,” Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the head of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that works with immigrants, said in a statement. “Birthright citizenship survived the Chinese Exclusion Act, Jim Crow, and today, it survived an executive order that would have essentially turned the maternity ward into a customs checkpoint.”
“Today, the Supreme Court defended the soul of this country and the very definition of what it means to be an American,” Voto Latino President Maria Teresa Kumar said in a statement.
She added: “By reaffirming that every child born on American soil is a citizen, the court chose to embrace our multiracial and multicultural reality, rather than succumb to a political agenda rooted in the fear of it.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court, citing congressional debate over the amendment. “We keep that promise today.”
Unlike much of the world, birthright citizenship is common across North, Central and South America. Many legal historians believe the roots of that geographic divide reach back more than 500 years, when European nations began sending settlers to their American colonies.
Europe’s aristocrat rulers wanted to encourage people to move to the colonies, but those colonists wanted their children — even if born overseas — to hold on to their European citizenship.
The practice remained in place as independence movements began to take shape and as independent nations began to emerge.
“By then, their legal traditions had already started to form,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “So by and large they continued some of the key legal practices of the colonial European governments that they had just severed ties with.”
“Trump’s attempted assault on the 14th Amendment was dealt a major blow today. This decision is a powerful affirmation of the Constitution and the enduring promise of equality it represents,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson. “For over 150 years, the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed citizenship to everyone born in this country. Today, the court rightly rejected efforts to undermine that core protection and instead upheld a principle that is essential to our democracy.”
Many of those pages are from the dissent penned by Justice Thomas and joined by Gorsuch. The majority opinion is 26 pages long, Thomas’s dissent runs to 91 pages.
In upholding a broad conception of birthright citizenship, the court rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
The justices relied on a long-settled understanding of the 14th Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, and more recent federal laws in ruling that anyone born in the country, with very limited exceptions, is a citizen.
The Republican president’s restrictions had been blocked by several lower courts and had not taken effect anywhere in the U.S.
During arguments in April, both conservative and liberal justices questioned the order’s legality in a momentous case that was magnified by Trump’s unprecedented attendance in the courtroom.
“Today’s news has nothing to do with safety or fairness in sports,” Trevor Project CEO Jaymes Black said in a statement. “These rulings only serve to send a message to transgender and nonbinary young people that says, ‘you don’t belong.’”
The Supreme Court on Tuesday erased limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and president, striking down a federal election law that’s more than 50 years old.
Prodded by a Republican-led lawsuit that includes Vice President JD Vance, the court’s conservative justices were again in the majority of the latest decision that upended congressionally enacted limits on raising and spending money to influence elections. The court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the door to unlimited independent spending in federal elections.
The limits on party spending stem from a desire to prevent large donors from skirting caps on individual contributions to a candidate by directing unlimited sums to the party, with the understanding that the money will be spent on behalf of the candidate.
The Supreme Court had previously upheld the limits in 2001.
“The Supreme Court gave cover to a campaign whose stated goal is to deny constitutional projections to trans people,” Imara Jones, CEO of TransLash Media, said in a statement. “The ultimate objective is to establish the cocktail of laws and systemic marginalization that will allow those in power to exclude larger and larger groups of Americans.”
“Sports are generally zero sum,” Kavanaugh said in the majority opinion. “Every biological male who makes the team takes a roster spot from a female athlete. Every biological male who earns playing time reduces the playing time of a female athlete. Every biological male who starts takes a starting position from a female athlete. Every biological male who wins a race takes the gold medal away from a female athlete.”
The ruling is another setback for transgender people.
The court’s conservative majority, which has repeatedly ruled against transgender Americans in the past year, ruled that state bans in Idaho and West Virginia don’t violate the Constitution or the federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in education.
More than two dozen other Republican-led states have adopted bans on female transgender athletes, and the decision seems certain to extend to them as well.
Left unresolved by the outcome are lawsuits challenging state laws and regulations in Connecticut, California and elsewhere that permit transgender athletes to compete consistent with their gender identity.
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