By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 30 (Reuters) – Handing President Donald Trump a stinging defeat, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected his audacious attempt to restrict birthright citizenship in the United States — a right long woven into the fabric of American society — scuttling one of his top priorities in his crackdown on immigration.
The justices in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Chief Justice John Roberts decided that Trump’s directive violated language in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment that confers citizenship to those born in the United States who are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
They upheld a lower court’s decision that blocked Trump’s executive order that had directed U.S. agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither parent is an American citizen or legal permanent resident, also called a “green card” holder.
Roberts was joined by fellow conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, as well as the court’s three liberal justices, in rejecting Trump’s order.
The ruling marked the third time this year that the court invalidated a major Trump initiative, following its February decision to strike down his sweeping global tariffs and a rejection on Monday of his bid to immediately fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.
‘WE KEEP THAT PROMISE’
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War of 1861 to 1865 that ended slavery in the United States, and overturned a notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision that had declared that people of African descent could never be U.S. citizens.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote, adding that the authors of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in the land.
“We keep that promise today,” Roberts wrote.
Kavanaugh, while agreeing with the ruling’s outcome, disagreed with its rationale. Kavanaugh said in a concurring opinion that the order contravenes a separate federal law codifying birthright citizenship rights but not the 14th Amendment itself.
Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.
Trump, who has repeatedly tested the limits of presidential power in domestic and foreign policy, issued the order last year on his first day back in office as part of a suite of policies to crack down on legal and illegal immigration. Critics have accused the Republican president of racial and religious discrimination in his approach to immigration.
‘TOO BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY’
Trump for years had threatened to limit who qualifies for citizenship at birth. Following Tuesday’s ruling, he wrote on his Truth Social platform that the ruling was “too bad for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process.”
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!” Trump wrote.
The challengers to Trump’s directive said the Supreme Court already had settled the question of birthright citizenship in an 1898 case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which recognized that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on U.S. soil, including to the children of foreign nationals.
“Not surprisingly, then, in the 128 years since, we have repeatedly understood the rule of Wong Kim Ark to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the United States and subject to its power,” Roberts wrote. “We see no reason to depart from that view today.”
The Trump administration contended that the 1898 precedent supported Trump’s order because, according to the court’s ruling in that case, at the time of his birth, Wong Kim Ark’s parents had permanent domicile and residence in the United States.
Roberts said there was “scant evidence” to support the Trump administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of how to interpret the citizenship language of the 14th Amendment to limit birthright citizenship.
“If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Roberts wrote.
THE NATION’S 250TH ANNIVERSARY
The Supreme Court weighed in on what it means to be an American citizen just ahead of the July 4 holiday when the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding.
Ahead of the ruling, some experts had estimated that Trump’s directive could affect the legal status of as many as 250,000 babies born each year and could require the families of millions more to prove the citizenship status of their newborns.
“The court’s decision reaffirms a fundamental American promise — if you are born here, you are a citizen,” said ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang, who argued the case on behalf of the challengers at the Supreme Court.
“A president cannot change the Constitution by executive fiat,” Wang added.
A CLASS-ACTION SUIT
The legal challenge considered by the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, involved a class-action lawsuit filed in New Hampshire by parents and children whose citizenship was threatened by the directive.
The 14th Amendment has long been interpreted as guaranteeing citizenship for babies born in the United States, with only narrow exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats or members of an enemy occupying force.
Its Citizenship Clause, states: “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.”
The administration has asserted that the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that being born in the United States is not enough for citizenship, and excludes the babies of immigrants who are in the country illegally or whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.
When the Supreme Court considered the case on April 1, Trump made history as the first sitting president to attend arguments before the top U.S. judicial body, though he left midway through, not long after the lawyer arguing against the administration had begun.
The Supreme Court last year gave Trump an initial victory in the birthright citizenship context in a ruling restricting the power of federal judges to curb presidential policies nationwide. That decision, however, did not resolve the legality of Trump’s directive.
During the arguments, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the administration, said the promise of citizenship for virtually any baby born on U.S. soil has spawned what he called a sprawling industry of “birth tourism.”
Sauer said that “uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades” to secure citizenship for their children. Asked to explain how serious an issue “birth tourism” had become, Sauer primarily cited media reports and conceded that “no one knows for sure.”
‘EXTRAORDINARY STEP’
Thomas, in a dissent joined by Gorsuch, wrote that many potential applications of Trump’s order are consistent with the original public meaning of the Constitution. The ruling “takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the president’s order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Thomas wrote.
In a separate dissent, Alito decried the ruling, which he said grants citizenship to the children of “birth tourists.”
“Careful analysis of the text of the 14th Amendment and the process that led to its adoption shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way,” Alito said.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, called the ruling “one of the most destructive and outrageous decisions in the long history of the Supreme Court.”
“American citizenship is not the birthright of the world. It belongs only and solely to Americans. No provision of the Constitution can be read to require our national self-obliteration,” Miller wrote in a social media post.
The court’s conservative majority has backed Trump on other major immigration-related policies since he returned to the presidency.
For instance, the court on June 25 cleared the way for the Trump administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation. On the same day, it sided with him by backing the U.S. government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
Tuesday was the final day of rulings for the court’s current term, which began in October.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Nate Raymond and Bhargav Acharya; Editing by Will Dunham)
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