Will the justices throw out a bedrock legal principle that has defined American citizenship for over a century?
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear oral arguments weighing the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s highly contentious executive order declaring that children born to parents in America illegally or temporarily are not U.S. citizens.
Trump signed the executive order purporting to end birthright citizenship on his first day in office. Birthright citizenship is defined under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and it 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 States wherein they reside.”
Since signing it, Trump’s bid to unwind a century of settled law has seen major blowback within the nation’s lower courts, where it has repeatedly been found unconstitutional or likely to be. The executive order was blocked no less than four times at the district court level and an appeals court also struck it down as unconstitutional, blocking it from going into effect nationwide.
Trump’s attempt to roll back a century of established law has sparked significant pushback in the nation’s lower courts.
Unable to escape a series of nationwide injunctions that lower courts slapped on Trump’s decree, the administration tried coming at the issue from another angle . The president asked the Supreme Court in March not to decide the merits of his order on birthright explicitly, but rather, to vastly restrict how nationwide injunctions from the district courts are issued.
They argued that the only people who should be allowed to sue are individuals directly impacted in a specific venue. The high court mostly agreed with the administration on the use of injunctions, and while some class action lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright order were allowed to proceed, the majority’s ruling dealt a significant blow to the public’s ability to challenge government overreach. Trump called it a “ GIANT WIN ” on Truth Social.
As HuffPost reported , Trump’s order declared that any child born in the U.S. to an undocumented person 30 days from Jan. 20, 2025, would not be considered an American citizen. (The order also included children of women who are in the U.S. “unlawfully” and children whose mothers are in the U.S. on a temporary but legal basis, such as a visa, and whose fathers were “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident” when the child was born.)
The White House did not immediately return a HuffPost request for comment.
Commenting on the decision Friday, Morenike Fajana, senior counsel at the Legal Defense Fund, said they and the ACLU look forward to going before the Supreme Court to “uphold the constitutional promise of citizenship for all babies born in America.”
“The Trump administration’s attempts to unilaterally rewrite the 14th Amendment — an essential Reconstruction-era measure that granted citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., including formerly enslaved people — will not stand,” Fajana said.
Arguments will be held next year, though the Supreme Court’s order on Friday did not specify a date.
