SCOTUSblog by Amy Howe 3/27/2026
On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in one of the highest-profile cases of the 2025-26 term – and indeed, one of the biggest cases in several years. Trump v. Barbara is a challenge to President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. All of the lower courts that have weighed in so far have ruled that the order is unconstitutional, but the Trump administration contends that those rulings – as well as the longstanding view that virtually everyone born in the United States is entitled to U.S. citizenship – are based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Constitution. The challengers counter that the Trump administration “is asking for nothing less than a remaking of our Nation’s constitutional foundations” – one that “would cast a shadow over the citizenship of millions upon millions of Americans, going back generations.”
The constitutional provision at the center of the case, known as the citizenship clause, is part of the 14th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution in 1868. The clause confers citizenship on anyone “born … in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” It was intended to overrule the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, holding that a Black person whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as enslaved persons was not entitled to any protection from the federal courts because he was not a U.S. citizen.
On Jan, 20, 2025, after he was sworn into office for a second term, Trump issued the executive order ending birthright citizenship. Beginning in 30 days, the order indicated, babies born in the United States will not be automatically entitled to citizenship if their parents are in this country either illegally or temporarily.
Trump’s order has never gone into effect, as challenges to it were filed almost immediately, and several federal judges around the country temporarily barred the government from implementing the order throughout the country while litigation over the order’s constitutionality continued. The administration came to the Supreme Court in March of last year, asking the justices to put those rulings on hold, but it did not ask the justices to weigh in on whether Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship violated either the Constitution or federal law. Instead, in Trump v. CASA, the administration asked the court to prohibit lower-court judges from issuing what are known as universal injunctions to block enforcement of orders like Trump’s anywhere in the country.
By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court rejected the concept of universal or nationwide injunctions. Writing for the majority, Justice Amy Coney Barrett stressed, among other things, that because there was no history of courts providing similar remedies in early English and U.S. history, modern lower courts therefore do not have the power to issue universal injunctions.
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, challenges to the merits of the executive order continued in the lower courts. In the case now before the court, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante on July 10 issued a preliminary injunction that barred the Trump administration from enforcing the executive order against a class of babies born after Feb. 20, 2025, who are or would be denied U.S. citizenship by Trump’s order. Laplante concluded “that the Executive Order likely ‘contradicts the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the century-old untouched precedent that interprets it.’”
A decision in the case is expected by late June or early July.
More:
https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/03/the-key-arguments-in-the-birthright-citizenship-case/
