Birthright citizenship: What is it and where does SCOTUS stand? 

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in April over the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. 

Trump signed an executive order his first day in office titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” This order said that U.S.-born individuals are not birthright citizens if their parents lack sufficient legal status, according to Oyez, an archive site for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Three families have challenged the order. One of the representatives is a Honduran asylum applicant, under the pseudonym Barbara, who learned that she was pregnant around the time Trump signed the executive order.

Trump made history as the first U.S. President to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court Case, Trump v. Barbara, represents one of the many components of the Trump administration’s reshaping of immigration policy. This approach includes the allocation of tens of billions of dollars to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a mass deportation campaign, according to the Council on Foreign Relations.

What is Birthright Citizenship?

Birthright citizenship is the principle that people born in the United States are guaranteed birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment, according to the American Immigration Council. The amendment grants citizenship to all persons “born or naturalized in the United States,” including formerly enslaved people, providing equal protection under the law.

The White House is at odds with this definition. On Jan. 20, 2025, a White House press release said that the “privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States.” Some of the exceptions, the press release said, are when the child’s mother was unlawfully present in the U.S. and if the father was not a lawful permanent resident or United States citizen.

The press release also said that the Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded persons who were born in the U.S. but not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” from birthright citizenship.

Maureen Sweeney, a University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law professor, said that the White House makes these statements to sound like the courts have never interpreted the law to include children of temporary noncitizens or noncitizens who are here without being inspected and admitted.

“They take that phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ and are interpreting it in a way it has never been interpreted by the courts,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney, who is the director of the Chacòn Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, said that these statements are not true, and that “the Supreme Court has included those groups” in the prior interpretation. She said that the White House’s interpretation has always been “out there” and that it wasn’t surprising that the justices were skeptical of the Trump administration’s arguments. 

When will a decision be reached?

The nation’s highest court is expected to hand down a decision in late June or early July, according to the ACLU.

“Assuming that the court upholds birthright citizenship — which it is my hope that they do — I expect it to not be very controversial because the position that the administration has taken is so extreme and is not in line with what the majority of Americans think of as what our law should be and what our law has been,” Sweeney said.

Sweeney said that there are two ways the court can uphold the current understanding: on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment or use a statutory provision in immigration law that says anyone born in the U.S. and subject to jurisdiction thereof is a U.S. citizen. 

A Migration Policy Institute study found that repealing birthright citizenship would actually increase the amount of unauthorized people living in the U.S. by 2.7 million by 2045.

“It’s important [to] just put this to rest, that [The Supreme Court] answers the Constitutional question, and that did seem to be what they were interested in doing,” Sweeney said. “I could see a world in which they did that.”