What Is Birthright Citizenship
Birthright citizenship is the rule that a child born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen, no matter who the parents are or what their immigration status is. Lawyers call it jus soli, the right of soil. It is written into the first sentence of the 14th Amendment, which is why a baby born in a Texas hospital to parents from anywhere on earth is an American at birth.
The Citizenship Clause says it in one line, ratified July 9, 1868.
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.
14th Amendment, Section 1
Birthright citizenship is automatic at birth. A child born here gets a Social Security number and a passport without applying for citizenship, because the Constitution grants it directly.
Key facts
- On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court held 6-3 that children born here to parents present unlawfully or temporarily are citizens at birth, blocking the 2025 order.
- Had that order been in force, about 260,000 babies born in 2023 would have been denied citizenship (Pew Research).
- A new order signed August 6, 2026 targets narrower groups. A federal judge blocked it for a class of families on September 2 (CASA v. Trump).
- The 2026 ruling rests on United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the 1898 case that held a U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants was a citizen.
If your family is affected, know your rights. As of September 2026, every child born on U.S. soil to parents covered by the 2025 order still receives citizenship, because the Supreme Court held that these children are citizens at birth. The ACLU’s birthright citizenship case page tracks the new August order in court, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Know Your Rights guide explains what the law protects right now.
What “Subject to the Jurisdiction” Means
The whole fight turns on six words in the middle of the Citizenship Clause. The amendment grants citizenship to people “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. In plain terms that means a person who has to obey U.S. law, which describes almost everyone physically here.
The exceptions have always been narrow. Wong Kim Ark named them: children of foreign diplomats, children born to enemy forces in hostile occupation, and, at the time, children of members of Indian tribes. The 2026 ruling relied on that case, so nearly every other child born on U.S. soil is a citizen, regardless of the parents’ status (Trump v. Barbara).
Birthright citizenship is one of two ways countries pass down citizenship, and the difference explains why the U.S. rule stands out.
The two ways nations grant citizenship at birth.
Source: Pew Research Center, March 31, 2026; Trump v. Barbara (2026)
The U.S. uses both. A child born here is a citizen by jus soli, and a child born abroad to a U.S. citizen can be a citizen by jus sanguinis. The 2025 order never touched the second path. It tried to shrink the first.
From Dred Scott to Wong Kim Ark
Birthright citizenship was written to overturn one of the worst rulings in Supreme Court history. In 1857 the Dred Scott decision denied citizenship to Black Americans, and in 1868 the 14th Amendment reversed it. The Court narrowed the clause for Native Americans in 1884. Then in 1898, Wong Kim Ark settled the rule for children of immigrants, and in 1924 Congress extended citizenship to Native Americans.
- Dred Scott denies Black citizenship The Supreme Court holds that Black Americans cannot be citizens, the ruling the 14th Amendment was written to reverse.
- 14th Amendment ratified The Citizenship Clause guarantees citizenship to all born in the U.S. and subject to its jurisdiction.
- Elk v. Wilkins limits the clause Native Americans under tribal jurisdiction are held not to be birthright citizens.
- Wong Kim Ark affirms the rule The Court holds 6-2 that a U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants is a citizen. Reaffirmed in 2026. (source)
- Indian Citizenship Act Congress makes Native Americans born in the U.S. citizens, closing the Elk v. Wilkins gap.
Sources: Elk v. Wilkins and United States v. Wong Kim Ark (Cornell Law School); Trump v. Barbara (2026).
How birthright citizenship became settled law, 1857-1924: 1857: Dred Scott denies Black citizenship (The Supreme Court holds that Black Americans cannot be citizens, the ruling the 14th Amendment was written to reverse.). 1868: 14th Amendment ratified (The Citizenship Clause guarantees citizenship to all born in the U.S. and subject to its jurisdiction.). 1884: Elk v. Wilkins limits the clause (Native Americans under tribal jurisdiction are held not to be birthright citizens.). 1898: Wong Kim Ark affirms the rule (The Court holds 6-2 that a U.S.-born son of Chinese immigrants is a citizen. Reaffirmed in 2026.). 1924: Indian Citizenship Act (Congress makes Native Americans born in the U.S. citizens, closing the Elk v. Wilkins gap.).
1857: In Dred Scott v. Sandford the Supreme Court ruled that Black Americans, free or enslaved, could not be citizens. The decision is the reason the Citizenship Clause exists.
1868: A Republican Congress wrote the 14th Amendment to overrule Dred Scott. Senator Jacob Howard, whom the 2026 Court called the clause’s principal author, said its language was “simply declaratory of … the law of the land already” (Trump v. Barbara, citing the Congressional Globe). The Civil Rights Act of 1866, passed first, made citizens of “all persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed.”
1884: In Elk v. Wilkins the Court held 7-2 that Native Americans under tribal jurisdiction were not birthright citizens, because they owed allegiance to their tribes. Congress made every Tribal citizen born in the United States a U.S. citizen in 1924, part of the history of tribal sovereignty and citizenship.
1898: In United States v. Wong Kim Ark the Court ruled 6-2 that a San Francisco-born laborer, the son of Chinese immigrants, was a citizen by birth. When he came home from a trip to China in August 1895, the port collector refused to let him land.
1924: The Indian Citizenship Act made Native Americans born in the United States citizens.
The 2026 Ruling in Trump v. Barbara
In Trump v. Barbara the Supreme Court applied Wong Kim Ark to a new order, and the 1898 rule held. President Trump signed Executive Order 14160 on January 20, 2025. It told federal agencies to deny citizenship documents to U.S.-born children when the mother was undocumented or on a temporary visa and the father was not a citizen or green-card holder. It never took effect.
- Order 14160 signed Tells agencies to deny citizenship papers to some U.S.-born children starting Feb 19, 2025.
- Courts block the order A Seattle judge halts it Jan 23. A Maryland judge issues the first preliminary injunction Feb 5.
- Trump v. CASA limits injunctions The Supreme Court curbs nationwide injunctions without ruling on citizenship itself.
- Supreme Court rules the children are citizens Trump v. Barbara, 6-3, relying on Wong Kim Ark. The injunction against the order stands. (source)
- New order 14418 signed Targets children of parents in new categories.
- Court blocks the new order Classwide injunction in CASA v. Trump, Sept 2.
Sources: Federal Register; Supreme Court of the United States; U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit; U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland.
The fight over the birthright order, January 2025 to September 2026: Jan 20, 2025: Order 14160 signed (Tells agencies to deny citizenship papers to some U.S.-born children starting Feb 19, 2025.). Jan 23, 2025: Courts block the order (A Seattle judge halts it Jan 23. A Maryland judge issues the first preliminary injunction Feb 5.). Jun 2025: Trump v. CASA limits injunctions (The Supreme Court curbs nationwide injunctions without ruling on citizenship itself.). Jun 2026: Supreme Court rules the children are citizens (Trump v. Barbara, 6-3, relying on Wong Kim Ark. The injunction against the order stands.). Aug 2026: New order 14418 signed (Targets children of parents in new categories.). Sep 2026: Court blocks the new order (Classwide injunction in CASA v. Trump, Sept 2.).
January 20, 2025: Executive Order 14160 was signed on inauguration day, with an effective date of February 19, 2025.
January 23, 2025: Judge John Coughenour in Seattle, a Reagan appointee, temporarily blocked the order on January 23, three days after it was signed. “This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” he said from the bench (CNN). Judge Deborah Boardman in Maryland issued the first preliminary injunction on February 5, and a federal court in New Hampshire later blocked the order for a nationwide class of children. On July 23, 2025, the Ninth Circuit held the order “invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment” (Ninth Circuit).
June 2025: In Trump v. CASA, decided June 27, the Supreme Court limited nationwide injunctions 6-3. It did not address whether the order was constitutional, which is why the fight went on.
June 2026: The Court heard Trump v. Barbara on April 1, 2026, and decided it on June 30, affirming the New Hampshire court’s injunction. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
August 2026: Five weeks later the president signed a narrower order, covered in the next section.
September 2026: Judge Boardman blocked the new order on September 2 for a class of families. “Barbara is the law of the land,” she wrote. “The President must follow it.”
The 6-3 headline hides the most important detail of the ruling. Only five justices held that the Constitution itself protects these children. Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed the order is unlawful on a different ground, the federal statute that repeats the Citizenship Clause’s words, 8 U.S.C. 1401(a), and disagreed with the constitutional holding.
- Held the order violates the 14th Amendment (5 justices) Roberts, Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, Jackson
- Held it violates the statute only (1 justice) Kavanaugh
- Would have let the order stand (3 justices) Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch
Source: Trump v. Barbara, No. 25-365 (June 30, 2026), Supreme Court of the United States.
The majority opinion answered the government’s main argument directly. The government had argued that citizenship depends on a parent’s “domicile,” meaning a lawful, permanent home here. “One who establishes a domicile in a new country does not automatically become a citizen thereof,” Roberts wrote, and the domicile reading “commanded only a dissent in 1898.” The opinion closes on the line most likely to be quoted for the next century.
Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights … We keep that promise today.
Chief Justice John Roberts, Trump v. Barbara, June 30, 2026
The dissents took the domicile view the majority rejected. Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, wrote that the clause never “guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.” Justice Samuel Alito called the ruling “one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court” and “a serious mistake.”
Two Supreme Court cases carry the same parties and get confused. Only the second decided the question.
The two Supreme Court cases on the birthright order, and what each one decided.
Source: Trump v. CASA (June 27, 2025); Trump v. Barbara (June 30, 2026), Supreme Court of the United States
New Orders and Bills After the Ruling
The ruling settled the 2025 order, but the effort to narrow birthright citizenship moved to new ground within weeks. On August 6, 2026, the president signed two orders, published in the Federal Register on August 11.
The first, Executive Order 14418, tells agencies to deny citizenship papers when neither parent is a citizen and a parent falls into one of several new groups. Those groups include members of designated terrorist organizations, some foreign-government employees, and parents who paid for a birth or surrogacy arrangement here. The second, Executive Order 14419, is a visa rule. It lets the State Department and Homeland Security deny or revoke visas for “birth tourism” but does not itself deny anyone citizenship.
Birth tourism is a small share of U.S. births. CDC data counted 9,576 U.S. births in 2024 to foreign residents (FactCheck.org), out of about 3.6 million births a year (Pew Research). The higher estimate often quoted, 20,000 to 26,000 a year, comes from a 2020 Center for Immigration Studies estimate; FactCheck.org notes the group advocates low immigration.
Congress is the other front, because Kavanaugh’s concurrence pointed to it. He wrote that Congress “could … amend §1401(a),” the statute he relied on. Bills to do that were filed within two weeks. None has passed a committee, and none has a Democratic cosponsor.
Bills in Congress to narrow or protect birthright citizenship, 2025-2026.
Source: Congress.gov bill status (govinfo), as of October 3, 2026
A statute cannot undo what five justices held the Constitution guarantees. The bills matter anyway. They keep the question alive in Congress, and they would matter if a future Court revisited the constitutional holding. That is why the ask in the letter below is a public “no” vote on all of them.
What Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Do
Ending birthright citizenship would reach hundreds of thousands of babies a year, and researchers have measured the scale. Pew counted 320,000 U.S. births in 2023 to mothers who were undocumented or on temporary status, about 9% of all births.
- 320,000
- U.S. births in 2023 to undocumented or temporary-status mothers, about 9% of all births
- 260,000
- of those 2023 babies who would have been denied citizenship under the 2025 order
- 255,000
- babies a year projected to be born without citizenship if birthright citizenship ended
Those are real children, not a forecast. In May 2025, Olga Urbina held her 9-month-old son, Ares Webster, at a protest outside the Supreme Court (NPR). The lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case goes by the pseudonym Barbara. She is a Honduran asylum seeker in New Hampshire, and her daughter was 8 months old on the day of the ruling. Her lawyers at the ACLU of New Hampshire said their clients were “excited and relieved” (Boston Globe).
The effect would compound across generations, and the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State researchers label their numbers as projections. If birthright citizenship ended, researchers project the unauthorized population would grow by 2.7 million by 2045 and 5.4 million by 2075, including 1.7 million people whose own parents were born in the U.S.
| Category | Value |
|---|---|
| By 2045: +2.7M projected | M2.7 |
| By 2075: +5.4M projected | M5.4 |
| By 2075: 1.7M of them children of U.S.-born parents | M1.7 |
Source: Migration Policy Institute and Penn State Population Research Institute, May 13, 2025. Figures are projections, not measured outcomes.
The MPI and Penn State researchers warn that ending birthright citizenship would create “a self-perpetuating, multi-generational underclass,” with U.S.-born residents inheriting their parents’ lack of status (Penn State). International law has the same worry: the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness says children should acquire the nationality of the country where they are born if they cannot acquire any other (UNHCR). In Plyler v. Doe in 1982, the Supreme Court warned of “a permanent caste of undocumented resident aliens” and said such an underclass “presents most difficult problems for a Nation that prides itself on adherence to principles of equality under law.”
How Other Countries Handle Birthright Citizenship
The U.S. approach is common in the Americas and rare everywhere else. Pew Research Center counts 32 other countries with birthright citizenship laws substantially similar to the U.S., most of them in the Western Hemisphere, and about 50 more with limited versions (Pew Research, March 31, 2026). Canada is among the 32. Justice Alito, citing Pew, wrote in his 2026 dissent that other than Canada, the U.S. is the only affluent nation where birth alone establishes citizenship.
Some developed nations ended unconditional birthright citizenship, and how they did it is the part that matters for the U.S. debate. Neither of the two below used an executive order. One changed the law by statute and one by a public vote.
Two democracies that ended unconditional birthright citizenship, and how.
Source: UK legislation.gov.uk (British Nationality Act 1981, section 1); Citizens Information, Government of Ireland
Both countries moved from jus soli to a rule that ties a child’s citizenship to a parent’s legal status, and Pew lists both, along with Australia, among countries where parents must be legal residents.
Can a President or Congress End Birthright Citizenship
A president cannot end birthright citizenship by order. In 2026 the Court held that the 2025 order violates the Constitution, and the courts that ruled on it before then, including the Ninth Circuit, had reached the same result. Because five justices placed the rule in the Constitution, ending it for good takes the process for changing the Constitution.
| Period | Value |
|---|---|
| Executive order or statute | Cannot override the clause |
| Constitutional amendment | 2/3 of Congress + 3/4 of states |
The legal argument on the other side has named proponents, and it deserves a fair hearing. It holds that “subject to the jurisdiction” requires a lasting allegiance, which temporary or undocumented parents lack. Justice Thomas’s 2026 dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch, adopted the domicile version and cited scholars including Kurt Lash, Ilan Wurman and Randy Barnett, along with Peter Schuck and Rogers Smith’s 1985 book Citizenship Without Consent.
The majority read the clause through the English common law and Wong Kim Ark. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, appointed by President Trump, joined that majority in 2026.
The public sides with the ruling, though not evenly. Most voters want to keep the Wong Kim Ark rule, and the divide runs inside the Republican Party more than between the parties.
- Keep the 1898 ruling
- Reverse it
Source: Quinnipiac University Poll, June 18-22, 2026, 1,165 registered voters, margin of error ±3.4 points. Gray shows respondents who did not answer.
A separate Reuters/Ipsos poll in April 2026 found the same pattern among all adults: 64% opposed ending birthright citizenship and 32% supported it (Reuters/Ipsos).
What Birthright Citizenship Does Not Do
Birthright citizenship makes the child a citizen, not the parents, and its reach has firm limits.
- A citizen child cannot sponsor a parent for years. A U.S. citizen must be at least 21 to petition for a parent’s green card (USCIS). A baby’s citizenship gives the parents no legal status.
- It does not cover every child born here. Children of foreign diplomats are not citizens at birth, an exception Wong Kim Ark traced to English law.
- Birth tourism is rare. CDC data counted 9,576 U.S. births in 2024 to foreign residents, out of about 3.6 million births a year.
Frequently Asked Questions
Has the Supreme Court ruled on birthright citizenship?
Yes. On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court held 6-3 that children born here to parents present unlawfully or temporarily are citizens at birth, relying on Wong Kim Ark and blocking the 2025 executive order. Five justices held the 14th Amendment protects these children, and Justice Kavanaugh agreed the order is unlawful on statutory grounds.
Is the August 2026 birthright citizenship order also blocked?
Executive Order 14418 was blocked on September 2, 2026, for the class of families in the Maryland case, CASA v. Trump. Litigation over it is ongoing. The companion order, 14419, is a visa rule and does not deny anyone citizenship.
Could Congress end birthright citizenship by passing a law?
Not while the 2026 ruling stands. Five justices held that the Constitution itself guarantees citizenship to these children, and a statute cannot override the Constitution. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately that Congress could amend the citizenship statute, and bills to do that are pending but have not passed a committee.
Why did the Court say Trump v. CASA was not the final answer?
Trump v. CASA, decided in June 2025, only limited nationwide injunctions. It did not address whether the order was constitutional. Trump v. Barbara did.
What you can do
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Ask your representative to vote no on H.R. 569 and H.R. 9633, and your senators to vote no on S. 304 and S. 4954. Each would narrow citizenship at birth by statute, and H.R. 9633 was written in direct response to the 2026 ruling. Ask for a public commitment, not a private assurance.
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Ask them to oppose every constitutional amendment on birthright citizenship. H.J.Res. 103, S.J.Res. 189, H.J.Res. 188, and H.J.Res. 190 would each limit the clause the Court applied in June 2026.
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Support the families still in court. The ACLU’s case page tracks the challenges to the August 2026 order, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund explains what the law protects now.
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Correct the record when you hear it. The answer to “a president can end birthright citizenship” is Trump v. Barbara. The answer to “it’s a loophole for parents” is that a citizen child cannot sponsor a parent until 21.
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Send the letter below. It asks your members of Congress to vote no on every bill and amendment listed here.