Supreme Court allows Trump to end birthright citizenship in some parts of the country
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday granted a bold bid by the Trump administration to throw out national injunctions that preserve the bedrock constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship while legal challenges to a White House executive order move forward in the federal courts.
In a 6-3 ruling, the court vacated nationwide injunctions issued by federal judges in Maryland, Washington state and Massachusetts, removing the broad scope of their decisions blocking President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 order that aims to keep the children of visa holders and undocumented immigrants from being American citizens by birth.
The Supreme Court’s ruling means the judges’ injunctions blocking Trump’s executive order only affect the jurisdictions where immigrant groups filed their lawsuits — leaving the rest of the country, including Florida, subject to the president’s citizenship order. The turn of events is likely to lead to more federal lawsuits, including a class action case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union in New Hampshire on Friday.
At a White House press briefing Friday, Trump praised the decision, saying birthright citizenship — enshrined in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment shortly after the end of the Civil War — was meant for the “babies of slaves.”
“It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system,” Trump said. “Hundreds of thousands of people are pouring into our country under birthright citizenship, and it wasn’t meant for that reason.”
His executive order, under the Supreme Court’s ruling, will take effect in 30 days. The court’s opinion now goes back to the lower courts to determine its practical implications.
The majority’s opinion boils down to a key finding that so-called universal injunctions issued by judges “likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.”
”The Government is likely to succeed on the merits of its argument regarding the scope of relief,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in the majority opinion, citing the 1789 Judiciary Act passed by Congress that created the federal court system. “A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such authority.”
In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the Trump administration of playing a game by asking the high court to allow it to apply the president’s “unconstitutional” citizenship order “to everyone except the plaintiffs” in the lawsuits challenging it.
“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it,” wrote Sotomayor, who was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan. “Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along.
“A majority of this Court decides that these applications, of all cases, provide the appropriate occasion to resolve the question of universal injunctions and end the centuries-old practice once and for all,” Sotomayor wrote. “In its rush to do so the Court disregards basic principles of equity.”
Calling the court’s ruling a “travesty,” Sotomayor emphasized that removing nationwide injunctions risks creating a patchwork of rights, where children born in some states may be considered citizens while others are not — leading to uncertainty, confusion and possible constitutional violations.
Jackson, who grew up in Miami and is the latest member of Supreme Court, concurred: “The Court’s decision to permit the Executive to violate the Constitution with respect to anyone who has not yet sued is an existential threat to the rule of law.”
Several elected officials, community leaders and advocates in South Florida expressed dismay over the court’s decision, slamming Trump’s executive order as an unconstitutional proclamation that leaves certain people’s rights to citizenship unprotected depending on where they live in the country.
U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a longtime South Florida Democrat, condemned the court’s decision on the social media platform X.
“A right-wing Supreme Court majority let Trump rip away birthright citizenship, forcing individuals to file burdensome lawsuits to get it back,” she wrote. “It’s a vile betrayal of our Constitution. We must stand up, speak out, and fight back.”
Miami-Dade County Mayor Daniella Levine Cava told the Miami Herald in a statement that the ruling “takes a wrecking ball to the fundamental values long held in our nation that if you are born in the United States of America, you are by birth a U.S. citizen.”
Renata Bozzetto, Deputy Director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said that the decision was not “just about court processes, but about who gets to be Americans.... This isn’t governance — it’s an attempt to rule by decree, to fracture our national identity, to reshape who is an American to their warped vision, and to roll back hard-fought constitutional protections.”
The Supreme Court’s ruling did not address the merits of the president’s controversial order, which contradicts the firmly established principle of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, a precedent that’s been unchanged for more than 125 years. Federal Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee who issued one of the nationwide injunctions out of Seattle, described Trump’s executive order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”
The Trump administration did not address that issue head on. Instead, in March, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to curtail a lower court’s ability to issue a nationwide injunction, hatching a novel legal strategy in its effort to radically revise the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. Justice Department lawyers asked that lower courts be barred from blocking Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship on a national scale.
In a March 13 filing to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration said that in an ideal world, the existing injunctions would apply to only the individuals who sued the federal government in a personal capacity. But the administration said it was also open to the court blocking the order on a more limited scale — for example, limiting the injunctions to the states and organizations that have participated in the lawsuits alongside the individuals.
Nationwide injunctions are court orders that block the federal government from enforcing policies across the entire country, not just for the individuals who sue. The Trump administration argued that these injunctions amount to judicial overreach, preventing the executive branch from implementing its policies.
“Universal injunctions compromise the Executive Branch’s ability to carry out its functions,” Justice Department attorney Sarah Harris wrote in her application to the Supreme Court, characterizing the nationwide blocks as having reached “epidemic proportions” since Trump’s return to the presidency.
Put simply, the Trump administration wanted the nation’s highest court — which Trump has had an outsize impact in shaping — to weigh in on a cornerstone tenet of U.S. immigration policies.
Critics, however, maintained that these injunctions are necessary to prevent unconstitutional actions from taking effect nationwide. They argued that if the high court limited national injunctions, Trump’s policy could go into effect in areas where lawsuits have not yet been filed, creating a patchwork of enforcement issues across the country. This could lead to widespread legal uncertainty and a waterfall of litigation — which might be the unspoken aim of the Trump legal team.
Such a development could have sweeping implications in a state like Florida, where the federal government found that over half a million residents are undocumented. Other estimates put that number close to 1 million. And researchers have also found that roughly 280,000 children live with at least one undocumented relative, in many cases a parent.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order to exclude the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visa holders from being Americans. The move broke with longstanding precedent that all babies born in the United States are automatically U.S. citizens, with the exception of the children of diplomats.
At the turn of the century, President Grover Cleveland indirectly challenged birthright citizenship during his administration by attempting to deny a U.S.-born citizen of Chinese descent to come back to the U.S. That triggered the landmark Supreme Court U.S. vs Wong Kim Ark case in 1898, which firmly established the principle of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment, a precedent that’s been unchanged for more than 125 years.
But the Trump administration argued that undocumented parents and temporary visa holders are not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, making their newborns ineligible for birthright citizenship. Trump ordered federal agencies to withhold passports and other official documents from them. He said during his campaign it would serve as a deterrent to irregular immigration.
READ MORE: One month in office: How Trump’s orders have reshaped decades of immigration policies
The executive order has sparked outrage amid advocates and lawyers who say it’s an attack on the very principles upon which the United States was founded. Over a dozen states and and multiple immigrants- and civil-rights groups have sued the Trump administration in several jurisdictions, including in the district courts that issued the injunctions Trump was challenging.
In one ruling blocking the order in Boston, Federal Judge Leo Sorokin said that the “Constitution confers birthright citizenship broadly,” including to the children Trump wanted to exclude from receiving citizenship.
Legal experts in the United States largely agree with this interpretation. However, some conservative scholars — sometimes characterized as on the fringes of American legal scholarship — affirm that the Trump administration could make a winning case to limit birthright citizenship.
The effort to redefine the 14th Amendment reflects a growing push among some Republicans to challenge longstanding interpretations of constitutional rights and reshape U.S. immigration law.
But while public opinion has swayed towards Trump on border security and deportations, polling shows that a majority of Americans disapprove of the president’s position on modifying birthright citizenship, with a recent Pew survey measuring 56% opposed to his executive order and just 43% in favor.
This story was originally published June 27, 2025 at 10:32 AM.
