The US Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide on the principle of birthright citizenship, which holds that all children born on US soil are American citizens.

The principle of birthright citizenship is rooted in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, and US President Donald Trump has called upon the court to interpret the section in a petition filed in September. On January 20, 2025, his first day in office of his second presidential term, President Trump issued an executive order entitled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” The order stated:

[T]he Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States… It is the policy of the United States that no department … of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship … to persons: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident… or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.

This executive order triggered a series of court challenges over the past year, starting with the grant of a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) against the executive order just three days after it was issued. The TRO was issued in response to a complaint filed by Arizona, Illinois, Washington and Oregon.

In the Trump administration’s response to the TRO, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their children, not to the children of illegal aliens, birth tourists, and temporary visitors.” The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the administration’s petition to reinstate the executive order in February.

In May, the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied an administration request to stay a preliminary injunction blocking the executive order.

In June, the Supreme Court issued a partial stay of the TRO without directly considering birthright citizenship. Instead, the Supreme Court limited the authority of district courts to issue orders that applied beyond the plaintiffs in a case, which could only happen in class-action lawsuits. In the same month, two immigrant rights groups filed a class-action lawsuit against the executive order.

Judge Joseph N. Laplante of the US District Court for the District of New Hampshire then ordered a national block of the executive order in July. Seattle District Judge John C. Coughenour of the Ninth Circuit upheld a block on the executive order later in the same month. The Trump administration returned to the question in September.

Cecillia Wang, the national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the plaintiffs in the present case, said, “No president can change the 14th Amendment’s fundamental promise of citizenship.”

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment has historically been interpreted as meaning that anyone born in the US, with a few narrow exceptions, is automatically a citizen.  The precedent goes back to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark in 1898, where the court held that a person of Chinese ancestry who was born in San Francisco was a US citizen.