U.S. Supreme Court Supports Trump’s Attempt to Restrict Birthright Citizenship
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June 27, 2025 Hour: 1:20 pm
Liberal Justice Brown Jackson warned that the new ruling would allow the Executive branch to violate constitutional rights.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court, with a conservative majority, sided with President Donald Trump’s request to lift lower court injunctions that had blocked his attempt to limit birthright citizenship.
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The ruling could have widespread implications for dozens of lawsuits challenging the administration’s human rights-related policies.
The decision does not address Trump’s executive order directly, which seeks to deny automatic citizenship to children born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents or those holding temporary visas. Instead, the Court’s ruling focused on whether lower federal courts have the authority to issue nationwide injunctions against executive actions.
Specifically, the justices reviewed temporary blocks issued by three federal judges in Maryland, Washington and Massachusetts. Previously, those judges had ruled that the U.S. president lacked the authority to modify or restrict constitutional provisions.
Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett stated that “federal courts do not wield general oversight over the Executive branch,” and instead “resolve cases and controversies as authorized by Congress.” “When a court concludes the executive has acted unlawfully, the answer is not for the court to exceed its own authority,” she wrote.
Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship — currently on nationwide hold while litigation proceeds — will not take effect until 30 days after the Court’s opinion is issued. That window could allow plaintiffs to consider filing class-action lawsuits rather than individual claims as a new path to challenge the policy.
Birthright citizenship is a constitutional right guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and cannot be overturned by presidential decree. Still, approximately 255,000 babies born annually in the U.S. could be affected by the proposed restrictions, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor announced her dissent from the bench — a rare move underscoring her deep disagreement with the majority. “The rule of law is not a given in this nation, or in any other. It is a principle of our democracy that endures only if those with the courage to defend it do so in every branch of government. Today, the Court abandons its vital role in that effort,” she stated.
In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned that the ruling would allow the Executive branch to violate the constitutional rights of individuals not named in lawsuits — posing what she described as an “existential threat to the rule of law” in the United Stated.
Jackson argued that by steering the case toward technical questions of judicial authority rather than addressing the substance of the executive order, the Trump administration was attempting to cast “a smokescreen” to exert “the arbitrary and unchecked power the Founding Fathers sought to eliminate through the Constitution.”
Curbing automatic citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants had been a key campaign promise for the Republican president, who signed the order on the day he was sworn in for a second term.
teleSUR/ JF
Source: EFE
