Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairman Adriano Espaillat and other Democratic House members react to the Supreme Court's decision to uphold birthright citizenship at the Capitol in Washington on Tuesday.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
Donald Trump has made it his mission to overturn many of the established principles of American life, but one of his signature priorities has just been ruled a bridge too far.
By affirming the right of anyone born in the United States to claim American citizenship − the 158-year-old right of birthright citizenship, granted by the 14th Amendment, that Mr. Trump, in his battle against immigrants, had challenged − the Supreme Court did more than simply affirm the process that has invited tens of millions into the country’s mainstream.
Of perhaps even greater importance, the high court’s decision was a symbolic affirmation of the role of immigration in the American character − and, more recently, in contemporary U.S. politics.
The birthright citizenship ruling Tuesday came only four days after two immigration decisions in Mr. Trump’s favour. One permits him to refuse admission to migrants who otherwise would have entered the U.S. to seek asylum. The other permits the President to expel some migrants from Haiti and Syria. Both affirm presidential prerogative while striking at the heart of the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, as asylum seekers and the people of those two chaotic countries might likely qualify as the “wretched refuse” who sought refuge through the “golden door” of U.S. citizenship.
Together the three decisions, coming at the end of the court’s 2025-2026 sitting, represent an unusual confluence of attention on a single issue − and the complexity of that issue, which for centuries has been a matter of immense passion and huge personal significance.
U.S. Supreme Court rejects Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship
So vital a part of American life is immigration that Oscar Handlin opened his landmark, 1952 Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People with these two sentences: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
One of the most significant sentences in recent Supreme Court history appears in the penultimate paragraph of Tuesday’s majority opinion: “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights − to freely participate in our political community.”
Six justices − three conservatives and three liberals − ruled against Mr. Trump, though only five did so on constitutional grounds. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the decision but based his view on congressional law rather than on a constitutional basis.
Though the flow of migrants to the United States has ebbed and flowed with time and circumstances − and has been interrupted by several spasms of nativism and “exclusion acts,” many of them based on race − overall it is one of the principal elements of the country’s story. Birthright citizenship has been a right since the period just after the Civil War. The 14th Amendment of 1868 provided automatic citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Mr. Trump felt so strongly about overturning the practice − which he and his supporters call “birth tourism” − that on April 1 he attended the Supreme Court hearing on the matter, the first time any sitting president had joined a court argument. The administration’s oral argument that day did not go well, and it was clear that the President’s extraordinary presence amid the 24 columns of Italian marble in the chamber was regarded as an inappropriate gesture of intimidation with a whiff of contempt for the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
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“The theory the Trump team put forward was a fringe theory − and was probably even too far fringe for even the court’s most conservative members to stomach,” said Paul Collins Jr., a professor of legal studies and political science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an expert on the American judiciary. “The administration was advocating an ‘out-there’ legal theory, and it was a pretty bold proposition to think that a president of the United States could unilaterally rewrite a constitutional amendment.”
The administration argued that the language of the amendment was intended, and should have been restricted to, the Reconstruction period after the Civil War. In its argument at the Supreme Court − for which the majority opinion said there was “scant evidence” − the White House team contended that the amendment was aimed at “children of temporary visitors and illegal aliens” and that such people “are not U.S. citizens by birth.” A SCOTUS poll found that 63 per cent of Americans said they believed the administration’s interpretation violated the Constitution.
Had they prevailed in the high court, some interpretations of birthright citizenship could have affected people whose lineage is similar to that of recent presidential candidates Vivek Ramaswamy, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz and Kamala Harris.
Over the years it became commonplace to say that the United States was “a nation of immigrants,” a phrase John F. Kennedy, then a senator from Massachusetts, cadged for the title of his 1958 book.
“Immigration to America can be pictured as ocean waves breaking on the shoreline,” wrote Mr. Kennedy, whose forebears came from Ireland between 1846 and 1855. “We can clearly see the crest of each successive wave, but if we look closer we can see that the waves are not really separate but continuous. Even at the moment that one wave is reaching its crest, the next is gathering force and building momentum.”
Indeed, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose family traces its American roots to a Dutch farmer who emigrated to New Amsterdam, now known as New York, in 1650, once opened a speech to the Daughters of the American Revolution with the greeting “Fellow immigrants.” And Ronald Reagan, until recently considered the model of modern conservatism, once said, “Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become citizens.” The 40th president signed legislation in 1986 that gave nearly three million people who entered the country illegally a path to citizenship.
In that April hearing on birthright citizenship, Solicitor-General John Sauer, about a year into his position as the administration’s advocate before the court, told the justices that Mr. Trump’s position merely sought to end what he called the “new world” of birth tourism.
“Well, it’s a new world,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. agreed, foreshadowing the court decision he would write three months later. “It’s the same Constitution.”