American Supreme Court Halts Trump Push to End Birthright Citizenship
President Trump tried to ban birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and some temporary foreign visitors.
The Supreme Court rejected President Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, and the justices reaffirmed the long-held principle that nearly all children who are born on U.S. soil are American citizens.
Mr. Trump’s executive order had aimed to prevent babies born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents from automatically becoming Americans. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, explained that Mr. Trump’s executive order violated the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “The framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’”
He added: “We keep that promise today.”
The 6-3 decision capped a more than decade-long effort by Mr. Trump to use the issue as a political tool. He seized on the question of who gets to claim to be an American prominently in 2011 when he pushed the racist lie that former President Barack Obama was really born in Kenya and ineligible for the White House.
Here’s what else to know:
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Read the decision: In a sign of the importance of the birthright decision, the court’s decision and dissents tallied nearly 200 pages.
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The majority: Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who had angered the right with her majority opinion on Monday in a 5-to-4 ruling allowing some mailed ballots to be counted after Election Day, again joined the court’s three liberals and Chief Justice Roberts to form a majority on the constitutional question before the court in the birthright case, guaranteeing that the opprobrium will continue.
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Dissents: Three of the court’s conservatives — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil M. Gorsuch and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — dissented in the case. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joined the court’s majority to strike down the executive order, but he said based his decision on a federal law, not on the Constitution.
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Other cases: In its other final rulings of the term, the Supreme Court allowed states to bar transgender female athletes from girls’ and women’s sports teams. And the justices lifted limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates, a win for the G.O.P.