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The Supreme Court of the United States dealt a significant blow to the immigration agenda of President Donald Trump on Tuesday by rejecting, with a vote of six to three, his attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship for children of parents without legal status, as reported by the agency Reuters.
The ruling, issued in the case Trump v. Barbara, invalidates Executive Order 14,160 -signed on January 20, 2025, the first day of Trump's second term- and upholds the principle that every person born on U.S. soil is a citizen of the country, regardless of their parents' immigration status.
The majority opinion and the dissenting votes
The chief justice, John Roberts, wrote the majority opinion with the support of both conservative and liberal justices.
"Citizenship, both then and now, was the right to have rights, to participate freely in our political community. The drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'all persons born free on this land.' Today, we uphold that promise," he asserted.
Five justices determined that the order directly violated the 14th Amendment.
The sixth vote of the majority, from the conservative judge Brett Kavanaugh, was more limited: he stated that the order violated federal law, but not necessarily the Constitution.
The three dissenters were the conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch.
What was the executive order aiming for?
The Executive Order 14,160 instructed federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of children born after 30 days from the signing of the order, if neither of their parents was a citizen or permanent resident.
Trump had described birthright citizenship as "ridiculous" in a December 2024 interview with NBC, and erroneously claimed that the United States was the only country that granted it.
In fact, more than 30 nations—among them Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, and Argentina—recognize that right.
According to estimates from the Migration Policy Institute, around 255,000 children born each year to non-citizen parents would have lost that right, with the risk that some could become stateless and be excluded from benefits such as Social Security and health services.
A legal battle that lasted more than a year
The order was blocked from the very beginning by the lower courts.
The federal judge John Coughenour, in Seattle, deemed it "openly unconstitutional" and suspended it nationwide in January 2025.
Attorneys General from 18 states, including California, New York, and Massachusetts, filed lawsuits to stop it.
In April 2026, Trump personally attended the oral arguments before the Supreme Court - an unprecedented occurrence for a sitting president - where the justices already expressed skepticism regarding the constitutionality of the measure.
Impact on Latino families
Today's decision is particularly significant for thousands of Latino families with mixed immigration status, whose children born in the United States would have been left in a state of legal uncertainty had the order been implemented.
The Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, had warned that "the ruling could have far-reaching consequences across the country."
The principle of birthright citizenship is supported by the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, and was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the historic case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898. With this ruling, the highest court reaffirmed that no executive order can unilaterally revoke a constitutional right that has been in place for over a century.
Trump's third significant defeat in court
This ruling represents the third significant defeat for Trump in front of the highest court in recent months, following the February decision that invalidated his blanket tariffs and the ruling that prevented him from dismissing Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve.
The contrast is striking: just five days earlier, the same Court had endorsed key aspects of Trump's immigration agenda, including the revocation of Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians and 7,000 Syrians, and the blocking of asylum seekers at the border.
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