On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order attempting to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. After a year and a half of litigation, the Supreme Court rejected the order as unconstitutional in Trump v. Barbara and reaffirmed its longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment: If you are born on U.S. soil, you are a U.S. citizen.

What does the 14th Amendment say about birthright citizenship?

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment 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.”

All three branches of government have long interpreted this language to signal a broad grant of citizenship. In keeping with that understanding, the Supreme Court ruled in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including the children of parents who are not U.S. citizens. The Court reaffirmed that understanding in 2026 in Trump v. Barbara: “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.’”

There are only a few narrow exceptions — for instance, U.S.-born children of foreign diplomats would not be considered American citizens. But, as the Court emphasized, those exceptions created no room for President Trump’s sweeping executive order.

Why is there a Citizenship Clause in the 14th Amendment?

The Citizenship Clause sought to resolve once and for all a long-running debate about who was entitled to U.S. citizenship. Until the 14th Amendment’s ratification in 1868, the Constitution and early federal law were largely silent on that matter. Early court opinions generally held to the long-standing common-law rule that people born in the country were American citizens — or at least that was the case for white people born in the country. The legal status of enslaved people and the large and growing population of free Black people was left unresolved. Without the protections of citizenship, free Black people faced violence and the risk of forced relocation to other countries. Free Black advocates pushed for a broad guarantee of birthright citizenship that would include them and all other people born in the United States.

The Supreme Court rejected this idea in the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, an 1857 case widely considered to be a stain on the Court’s legacy. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that Black people — whether enslaved or free — were not and could never be American citizens. To Taney, citizenship was a status that the government could bestow at its discretion and that the founders had chosen not to extend to Black people.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, Republicans in Congress fiercely repudiated Dred Scott, culminating in the passage of the 14th Amendment. There, they constitutionalized a broad and inclusive grant of birthright citizenship, removing from politics going forward the question of who is a citizen. (For more on the history of the Citizenship Clause, see this friend-of-the-court brief from professors Martha S. Jones and Kate Masur filed in a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order.)

In her concurrence in Trump v. Barbara, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson drew on this history. As she noted, “freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people” and they and the drafters of the 14th Amendment understood that “the only path forward that could prevent a return—in any form—to slavery and race-based subordination was to link the fates of all.” The amendment therefore extended citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil, subject to the very narrow exceptions discussed above.

Was the 14th Amendment meant to apply to the children of immigrants living in the United States?

Congressional records indicate that the 14th Amendment’s broad guarantee of birthright citizenship was always intended to include the children of immigrants, regardless of their parents’ legal status.

When Congress debated the language of the Citizenship Clause in 1866, Sen. Jacob Howard explained that the clause was “simply declaratory of . . . the law of the land already, that every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States.” Several lawmakers expressed concerns that such a broad guarantee would extend citizenship to the children of immigrants. Sen. John Conness affirmed that the proposed language “declare[s] that the children of all parentage . . . should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.”

In line with Howard and Conness’s understandings, the final text of the Citizenship Clause featured no language barring the children of immigrants from citizenship. The Supreme Court affirmed this understanding in Wong Kim Ark, where it rejected claims that children born in the United States to noncitizen parents were not themselves citizens, and it did so again in Trump v. Barbara.

What did Trump’s executive order claim to do to birthright citizenship?

Executive Order 14160 purported to deny citizenship to any baby born in the United States to a mother who was present “unlawfully” or “lawful[ly] but temporar[ily]” and a father who was “not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.” In other words, under the order, the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants and the children of parents residing in the country under temporary legal authorization, such as student visas and work visas, would not be considered U.S. citizens.

What would have been the consequences of ending birthright citizenship?

Trump’s executive order would have caused major problems across the country if it had been allowed to go into effect. Lawyers challenging the order believed that hundreds of thousands of children in the United States would have been denied citizenship, thereby creating a new subclass of people lacking the full rights and protections long enjoyed by citizens.

Additionally, without U.S. citizenship, some of these children could have been rendered stateless, meaning they would not have been recognized as citizens of any country. As the United Nations Refugee Agency has noted, people who are stateless often lack access to basic rights and services, such as health care, education, and the ability to travel freely. Without U.S. citizenship, these children could have also ended up deported to foreign countries where they never lived and where their welfare would have been endangered.

The order would have also created significant administrative problems. Government offices would no longer have been able to rely on birth certificates to determine citizenship. And by empowering government officials to question people’s citizenship status, the order would have opened the door to discriminatory and arbitrary government interference in people’s daily lives. This problem would not have just been limited to the children denied citizenship under the order: Under the new legal regime that the order would have created, everyone would have been vulnerable to having their citizenship questioned.