Court strikes out Trump’s second major policy 

The United States Supreme Court has struck down former President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, reaffirming that nearly all individuals born on U.S. soil are entitled to American citizenship under the Constitution.

In a 6-3 decision delivered on Tuesday in Trump v. Barbara, the court ruled that the executive order violated the U.S. Constitution. Chief Justice John Roberts led the majority, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a separate opinion, also concluded that the directive violated federal law.

Dissenting were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.

The decision marks the second major policy from Trump’s second term to be invalidated by the Supreme Court, following its February ruling that struck down key aspects of his tariff measures.

Trump signed the executive order on his first day after returning to office as part of a broader immigration agenda. The directive sought to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born in the country to parents who were either living in the United States illegally or were in the country on temporary visas.

Writing for the majority, Roberts underscored the constitutional importance of birthright citizenship.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today,” he wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Thomas, joined by Gorsuch, argued that the court had wrongly declared the executive order unconstitutional, saying the ruling added “to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

The executive order attempted to overturn the long-established interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to all persons born or naturalised in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction. The principle has been embedded in U.S. law since the Nationality Act of 1940 and reaffirmed by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

The Supreme Court previously upheld birthright citizenship in its landmark 1898 ruling, recognising only limited exceptions, including children of foreign diplomats, occupying forces and certain Native American groups. Congress later extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States in 1924.

Although the Trump administration argued that unrestricted birthright citizenship encouraged illegal immigration and so-called “birth tourism,” the executive order never took effect after being blocked by multiple federal courts.

According to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute, about 250,000 babies each year could have been denied U.S. citizenship if the policy had been implemented.

The case attracted widespread attention, with Trump attending oral arguments in April, becoming the first sitting U.S. president in modern history to do so. Lower federal courts in New Hampshire, Washington, Massachusetts and Maryland had previously issued nationwide injunctions preventing the order from taking effect before the Supreme Cour

t delivered its final ruling.