The Supreme Court’s June 30 decision striking down limits on birthright citizenship also ignited a sharp, two-Black-justice showdown. Clarence Thomas argued the Constitution and civil-rights history don’t grant citizenship to the children of temporary visitors
By the time the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, the ruling had already settled the headline question: whether babies born in the United States could be denied citizenship based on their parents’ status.
On June 30. the Court struck down Trump’s executive order barring federal agencies from recognizing citizenship for children born in the country unless at least one parent was an American citizen or a lawful permanent resident. The decision was 6-3, and it did not just refute the policy. It also exposed a tense fault line inside the justices themselves—between Clarence Thomas and Ketanji Brown Jackson. both Black justices—over what the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment requires.
The case began with Trump’s order directing federal agencies not to recognize the citizenship of babies born in the United States if they do not have at least one parent who is an American citizen or lawful permanent resident. Expectant parents, immigrant rights groups, and 22 state attorneys general sued to challenge the order.
The majority opinion, rejecting Trump’s attempt to change how the constitutional guarantee had historically been understood, concluded that children born to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily in the United States still satisfy the citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
That clause is explicit. It states: “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Trump’s argument pressed a different reading of history. He said the amendment—ratified in 1868 after the Civil War—was intended to protect the rights of the children of slaves, not the temporary visitors or undocumented immigrants he sought to exclude.
The sharpest dispute between the justices turned on a case that still haunts U.S. constitutional law: the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott, which ruled that a slave could not be a citizen or claim the rights and privileges that citizenship would confer.
In his dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas—appointed by Republican President George H.W. Bush—said Congress overruled Dred Scott with the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment. But he argued those provisions did not provide citizenship to visitors.
Thomas wrote that “Both the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race,” and added that “Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”
He drew a line between categories of people. writing that unlike temporary visitors from other nations. Black Americans were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans. In his view. they had “no other homeland. owed no allegiance to any foreign power. and were subject to no other authority.”.
Thomas also argued that the Fourteenth Amendment had “been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.” He joined his dissent with Justice Neil Gorsuch.
Jackson, in her concurring opinion, took that framing head-on. She accused Thomas of “repurpos[ing]” the Fourteenth Amendment and said the logic he used echoed Dred Scott by agreeing with Trump to deny citizenship to the children of tourists or undocumented immigrants.
Jackson wrote that the Fourteenth Amendment’s “universalist aims” endured through debates over whether children of Chinese or Roma immigrants should be considered citizens.
She also rejected Thomas’s depiction of the Reconstruction-era amendments as limited remedies. “The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste. antisubordination reset for the Nation. not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery. ” she wrote. arguing that the minority view “pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”.
At the center of her critique was the idea of conditional belonging. “Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship,” Jackson wrote.
The sequence is difficult to miss: the Court’s majority rejected Trump’s attempt to narrow the Fourteenth Amendment’s promise. while Thomas and Jackson—on opposite sides in their written opinions—argued over whether the Constitution’s meaning turns on “domicile. ” on the history of Reconstruction. or on who is treated as belonging to the nation in the first place.
For families caught in the real-world consequences of those arguments, the legal language is more than doctrine. Trump’s executive order had sought to strip citizenship from babies born in the United States unless one parent was a citizen or lawful permanent resident. and the ruling on June 30 stopped that approach in its tracks. But the dueling opinions ensure that the debate over birthright citizenship’s reach—whether the Constitution grants it universally or only under narrower conditions—won’t disappear with this decision.
birthright citizenship Supreme Court Clarence Thomas Ketanji Brown Jackson Fourteenth Amendment Dred Scott Trump executive order immigration policy June 30 decision 14th amendment citizenship clause