In rebuke to Trump, Supreme Court upholds birthright citizenship, emphasizing the promise of equality in the Declaration of Independence

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Morgan Marietta, University of Tennessee

(THE CONVERSATION) The Supreme Court on June 30, 2026, declared that universal birthright citizenship is protected by the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, meaning that nearly all babies born in the United States automatically become American citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

The ruling rejects President Donald Trump’s executive order, signed the first day of his second administration, which sought to end birthright citizenship for the children of parents present in the country illegally and for tourists visiting only temporarily.

The high court ruled that “under the Constitution, they are citizens by birth.”

A close decision

The ruling was split 5-4 on the meaning of the 14th Amendment. A sixth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, ruled against the Trump order on the grounds that it violates federal law – which Congress could alter – but not the Constitution itself, making the ruling 6-3 against Trump.

Supreme Court watchers, including myself, expected the three liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – to rule in favor of universal birthright citizenship, but imagined that the six conservatives would divide.

Two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, joined the liberals to form a narrow majority.

Four of the justices appointed by Republican presidents see the original public meaning of the 14th Amendment as quite different, primarily recognizing the citizenship of former slaves and their descendants after the Civil War. But they don’t see it applying to anyone born in the United States regardless of parentage.

In their view, birthright citizenship was only promised to those whose parents were legal residents with sole allegiance to the United States. As they see it, the American people can expand federal law to grant citizenship to others if they choose, but the Constitution does not demand it.

The meaning of the Declaration

The timing of the landmark ruling is meaningful, coming a few days before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

As a longtime observer of the Supreme Court, I believe the best way to understand the dispute is that it reflects a deep conflict over how we see the meaning of the Declaration of Independence and how it frames the meaning of the Constitution.

Roberts concludes the ruling with the statement that “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community.”

This is a reference to a famous quote from Chief Justice Earl Warren dissenting in a 1958 ruling recognizing congressional power to strip a native-born American of their citizenship for voting in a foreign election. Warren, the chief justice who authored Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and many other landmark rulings expanding constitutional rights, wrote that “Citizenship is man’s basic right for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”

In Warren’s – and Roberts’ – view, the Declaration of Independence established not only the importance of individual rights, but also the equality of all in holding those rights. Citizenship must be equal and open, defined as broadly as the Constitution allows, rather than narrow in its scope.

When the 14th Amendment expanded citizenship after the Civil War, it did so with universal language, addressing race but also something broader: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

In the majority’s view, this must be read broadly to achieve the declaration’s insistence on rights and equality.

The dissenters believe that the declaration did something else: It established a new sovereign people who control their own definition of citizenship. In this view, the Declaration of Independence established a distinct kind of equality — an equal share in control over the government through political representation and elections.

This view means that the current citizens must agree to offer an equal share in governance to any new members of society, but there is no such thing as citizenship without consent: No one can demand citizenship in a democracy by violating its laws.

Accepting or rejecting the British inheritance

On the second page of the ruling, Roberts explains that “the story of citizenship in the United States begins with the English common law.”

Going back to the landmark Calvin’s Case in 1608, the British rule was that anyone born in the dominion of the king was a natural born subject.

Roberts writes that “This view crossed the Atlantic with the colonists — and was adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution, as ‘subjects’ of the sovereign became ‘citizens’ of the States.”

This British common law rule of broad citizenship shaped the discussion in the key case of Wong Kim Ark in 1898. As Roberts summarizes it, “What the Court held in Wong Kim Ark was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States.”

In the view of the dissenters, the problem is that subjects are not citizens. That means that being “under the jurisdiction” of the United States is very different from being under the jurisdiction of England or any other previous nation.

Justice Clarence Thomas dissented on the grounds that “the English principle was a rule of feudal servitude, not a rule of citizenship.”

Justice Samuel Alito agreed in his dissent, referring to the common law as “a medieval rule” and an “ancient British rule that even the United Kingdom has abandoned.”

Alito insists that “the Declaration of Independence repudiated the foundation on which the British rule was based” because it “emphatically rejected the British theory of government.”

5-4 on the meaning of July 4

The Declaration of Independence established a new relationship between individuals and the government, moving from the government controlling the people to the people controlling the government. Subjects became citizens, and with it came the authority over who can become a new citizen.

In the now-controlling interpretation of the Constitution, the American people did just that through the 14th Amendment, expanding the nature of citizenship to a more universal and equal footing, in line with the new racial equality the amendment enshrines.

Birthright citizenship applies to all who are born here. That view is now the law of the land.

In the other, now-dissenting view, the 14th Amendment granted citizenship only to those “who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”

Both sides agree, as Alito phrased it, that this may be “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court.”

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here: https://theconversation.com/in-rebuke-to-trump-supreme-court-upholds-birthright-citizenship-emphasizing-the-promise-of-equality-in-the-declaration-of-independence-286012.