Supreme Court Says It Will Hear Trump’s Bid To End Birthright Citizenship

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.

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.