Supreme Court Blocks Trump Executive Order Seeking to Limit Birthright Citizenship

The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the Trump administration’s attempt to use an executive order to restrict birthright citizenship, leaving in place the longstanding rule that most children born on U.S. soil are U.S. citizens.

The decision, issued June 30, 2026, blocks President Donald Trump from enforcing Executive Order No. 14160, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which he signed on Jan. 20, 2025. The order directed federal agencies not to recognize citizenship at birth for certain U.S.-born children based on their parents’ immigration status.

Under the order, that denial would have applied to children born in the United States if their mothers were unlawfully present, or were lawfully but temporarily present, and the father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

The policy had already been blocked in multiple lower courts and had never taken effect nationwide before reaching the justices. Tuesday’s ruling means the administration cannot implement those birthright-citizenship restrictions through this executive order.

According to reporting by The Associated Press and The Washington Post, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court’s main opinion in a 6-3 judgment against the administration. AP and The Post reported that Roberts was joined in full by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberal justices, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred separately in the judgment. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The ruling is a major defeat for an effort to change how the federal government recognizes citizenship for U.S.-born children without going through Congress or the constitutional amendment process. Instead, the administration had tried to narrow birthright citizenship by executive action alone.

At issue was the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States …” For more than a century, that language has been understood to guarantee citizenship to nearly everyone born in the country, with narrow exceptions.

The leading precedent is United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision widely understood to protect birthright citizenship for people born in the United States. The litigation over Trump’s order unfolded against a shifting procedural backdrop after the court’s June 2025 ruling in Trump v. CASA, Inc. limited nationwide injunctions, but Tuesday’s decision squarely rejected this executive-order approach.

The practical effect is immediate. Children who would have fallen into the categories targeted by the order remain recognized as U.S. citizens at birth, and federal agencies cannot apply the restrictions Trump sought to impose.

The stakes were substantial. Analyses cited by AP and The Washington Post, drawing on work from the Penn State Population Research Institute and the Migration Policy Institute, estimated that more than a quarter-million U.S. births each year could have been affected by the order.

Roberts, as quoted by AP and The Washington Post from the opinion, framed the case in broad constitutional terms: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”