(Washington)—The Immigrant Legal Resource Center applauds the Supreme Court for rightfully striking down the Trump administration’s unlawful and disgraceful attempt to end birthright citizenship. This decision reinforces the tenets of the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the right to citizenship for those born in the United States.
Birthright citizenship is protected by the U.S. Constitution, and the president cannot simply change the Constitution by executive order if he disagrees with what it says. Birthright citizenship guarantees that anyone born in the U.S. is treated equally under the law if they are born in the United States.
The Trump administration issued the executive order to end birthright citizenship right after his second term began, unleashing a torrent of hateful and racist orders and policies aimed at achieving his mass deportation campaign. The ILRC has been pushing back on these attacks and will continue to do so along with our partners in these fights.
The court split 5-4 on whether the executive order violated the 14th Amendment and 6-3 on whether it violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. Justice Brett Kavanaugh dissented on the constitutional issue but sided with the majority on the statutory issue. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented on both issues.
In writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roberts wrote: “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, adding, “We keep that promise today.”
In her concurrence, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote: “The Fourteenth Amendment is not color-blind; rather, its core principle is that our Nation does not tolerate racial caste—i.e., the systemic subordination that many (even some who opposed slavery) had wished to perpetuate after the Civil War. So, the architects of the Second Founding did not think or pretend that race didn’t matter. Quite to the contrary, they understood that race made an enormous difference to the lived experiences of all concerned—and to the fate of our union. Indeed, it is for that very reason that a radical restructuring was required. The Citizenship Clause applies universally precisely because such universal application was necessary to achieve the Amendment’s own race-conscious remedial purposes.”