Supreme Court rejects Trump birthright citizenship order

On Tuesday, Roberts wrote for the court that children born in the U.S. to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S. and are citizens at birth under the citizenship clause.

The chief justice said the holding of Wong Kim Ark “was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States. Not surprisingly, then, in the 128 years since, we have repeatedly understood the rule of Wong Kim Ark to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the United States and subject to its power.”

An earlier round of the litigation was before the justices last Supreme Court term, in a case called Trump v. CASA. That case, however, was about the scope of nationwide injunctions that challenged Trump’s order, not the underlying merits of the order. Notably in the CASA case, the administration didn’t press the justices to quickly rule on the order’s merits, even though the administration hasn’t been shy about seeking speedy relief on an array of issues.

Dissenting in CASA last year, Sotomayor wrote that it was “obvious” why the government wasn’t asking the court to approve the merits of the order. “To get such relief,” she wrote, “the Government would have to show that the Order is likely constitutional, an impossible task in light of the Constitution’s text, history, this Court’s precedents, federal law, and Executive Branch practice.”

Joined by Gorsuch in dissent on Tuesday, Thomas said the majority “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”

Jackson wrote a concurrence joined by Sotomayor in which she said that despite “his longstanding endorsement of a ‘colorblind’ Constitution,” Thomas “now surprisingly suggests that the Citizenship Clause was a race-conscious remedial measure.”

In his own dissent, Alito called the case “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court” but that the court “has made a serious mistake” in its ruling. “Careful analysis of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the process that led to its adoption shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way,” he wrote. “Instead, the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”