Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds

In a sharp rebuke to President Donald Trump, the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's 6-3 opinion.

The decision firmly rejected the executive order that Trump issued on the first day of his second term. It sought to bar citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to parents who either entered the country illegally or who are living and working here legally with temporary visas. The executive order never went into effect because every lower court judge who reviewed it concluded, in the words of one judge, that it was "blatantly unconstitutional."

Trump has long maintained that the Constitution does not guarantee birthright citizenship. But as Chief Justice Roberts observed, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution after the Civil War defined citizenship in broad terms on purpose, rejecting the views of those who wanted to limit citizenship. The resulting language of the amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Trump maintained that the provision was meant to apply only to former slaves, but "wasn't meant for the entire world to occupy the United States." That interpretation, however, has not been embraced by the courts or the legal norms of the country for 160 years. Indeed, Chief Justice Roberts' opinion for the court pointed to the court's landmark ruling well over a century ago in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873 to Chinese immigrants. Back then, no documentation was required for immigrants entering the United States, and his parents ran a business in San Francisco until they ultimately returned to China. In 1895, their son visited his family in there, but was denied re-entry upon his return to the U.S., on the grounds that he was not a citizen. He challenged that denial and won in the Supreme Court.

By a 6-to-3 vote, the justices interpreted the words, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," to mean that all children born in the U.S. were automatically granted citizenship — with three limited exceptions, only one of which exists today — for the children of foreign diplomats.

The decision in the Wong Kim Ark case was so widely accepted that even in periods of great hostility to immigrants, the notion of birthright citizenship remained untouchable. So much so that in World War II, when Japanese citizens were held as enemy aliens in detention camps in the United States, their newborn children were automatically granted American citizenship because they were born on U.S. soil. In addition, Congress subsequently codified that legal understanding.

The ACLU's Cecillia Wang, herself a birthright citizen born to Chinese parents, argued the birthright case in April before the Supreme Court. As she put it, the men who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment deliberately chose to confer automatic citizenship on the child, not the parent, the idea being that "in America we do not punish children for the sins of their fathers, but instead we wipe the slate clean. When you're born in this country, we're all American, all the same."

Dissenting from Tuesday's decision were Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Samuel Alito.

This is a developing story and will be updated

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