Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling keeps door open for opposition
Christian Science Monitor · C · trust 36/100
| Lenin Nolly/Sipa USA/AP/File Demonstrators from the American Civil Liberties Union hold a rally outside the Supreme Court to defend the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship, as the high court hears arguments in Trump v. Barbara, April 1, 2026, in Washington. Loading...
July 22, 2026, 1:53 p.m. ET | Washington and Austin, Texas
The U.S. Supreme Court had recently voted down President Donald Trump’s attempt to reinterpret the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, but the small crowd of activists in front of the high court, sheltering under umbrellas as a thunderstorm moved off, were wary of letting their guard down.
Laura Horn had traveled to the capital from Youngstown, Ohio, with her daughter, Riley, and her mother, Ginger Gibbons, just to show support for the amendment on July 9, the anniversary of its ratification in 1868. Twelve hours of their Thursday and Friday would be spent on a bus, but, she said, it was worth it.
The Supreme Court had struck down Mr. Trump’s order in the case Trump v. Barbara a week earlier, but Mrs. Horn – a stay-at-home mom who volunteers for the local Democratic Party – doesn’t think the issue is resolved.
A recent Supreme Court decision affirmed that anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen. But the fact that the case reached the high court, and reaction to the decision, signals that the national discussion about birthright citizenship is not settled.
“You don’t have to go very far back to a time when we all came here from somewhere else,” she said after rain chased the rally indoors to a hotel convention hall. “With this conservative Supreme Court, we still have to confront the possibility that this will be the end of birthright citizenship.”
The high court’s decision in Barbara preserved the status quo: that the birthright citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment grants automatic citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. But only just. Four of the court’s nine justices said that Mr. Trump’s order – which would have denied automatic citizenship for the children of parents in the country unlawfully or temporarily – did not violate the 14th Amendment. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that the order violated federal law, but not the Constitution.)
Scott Baldauf/The Christian Science Monitor Laura Horn (at left) and her daughter, Riley, and mother, Ginger Gibbons, rode the bus from Youngstown, Ohio, as a day trip to participate in a rally to defend the 14th Amendment, in Washington, July 9, 2026. What birthright citizenship means, or should mean, has been debated ever since the amendment’s ratification. Mr. Trump’s order, and the court ruling that followed, has called the country to once again reckon with the 14th Amendment, the centerpiece to what historians call America’s “second founding.” When the amendment passed in the wake of the Civil War, many scholars say, the country took a step toward fulfilling the ideals of the Revolutionary War by extending individual rights – including a right to citizenship – to everyone.
Others have a narrower reading, however, arguing that its authors never meant to extend automatic citizenship to everyone who happens to be born in the United States. Some, including Mr. Trump himself, are calling for continued efforts to adopt that narrower reading, ensuring that the argument over the 14th Amendment is not over.
Two opinions in the Barbara decision – written by the two Black members of the high court – distilled this debate to its core question: Why was the 14th Amendment enacted?
In the view of Justice Clarence Thomas, the amendment was intended to grant full and equal rights to newly emancipated slaves.
The Barbara majority, he wrote in a dissent (which Justice Neil Gorsuch joined), “adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”
To be sure, the 14th Amendment has since been used to expand constitutional protections for groups not explicitly mentioned in its text, such as prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race (including for whites) and sex, and overturning laws banning interracial marriage and same-sex marriage.
But this was the original purpose of the 14th Amendment, wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a concurrence that served as a direct response to Justice Thomas’ dissent.
Francis Chung/POLITICO/AP Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas departs the U.S. Capitol in Washington, June 29, 2026. His dissent, she wrote, “pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing.”
“Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this” in the Barbara ruling, she added, “and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding – that all human beings are created equal – once more.”
Within hours of the court handing down its decision in Trump v. Barbara, various right-wing commentators – and one Trump official – described the decision as: “apocalyptically and indefensibly bad” ; “madness” and “evil” ; and the “suicide [of American] civilization.”
The irony, for some legal experts, is that Barbara is a rare example of the high court interpreting the 14th Amendment broadly.
“From my perspective the 14th Amendment has never been fully embraced,” says Aderson François, director of the Civil Rights Clinic at the Georgetown University Law Center.
Within 15 years of its ratification, for example, the court had issued two decisions narrowing the amendment’s application, helping to bring about a century of racial segregation in southern states. That era continued until the high court issued another tranche of decisions, such as Brown v. Board of Education, ending segregation.
Other recent rulings have narrowed or overturned civil rights era decisions on issues like the Voting Rights Act and affirmative…
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