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Washington, D.C. – November 21, 2025 – The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to meet in private conference today to consider one of the most explosive constitutional challenges of President Donald Trump’s second term: his executive order ending automatic birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas.
Signed on January 20, 2025 — Trump’s first day back in the White House — the order declares that such children are no longer entitled to American citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. The policy has never taken effect anywhere in the country, having been blocked by a series of lower-court rulings that have unanimously declared it unconstitutional. The justices could announce as early as Monday whether they will take up the administration’s appeal. If they do, oral arguments would likely be held this spring, with a final ruling expected by late June or early July 2026.
The case, captioned Trump v. Barbara in the Supreme Court docket, consolidates two major lower-court defeats for the administration. In July, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld a nationwide preliminary injunction issued on behalf of a coalition of Democratic-led states led by Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon. The court ruled that allowing the order to take effect in some states but not others would create intolerable chaos in everything from school enrollment and driver’s licensing to interstate travel and federal benefits administration.
Separately, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante in Concord, New Hampshire — a George W. Bush appointee — certified a nationwide class action covering every child born in the United States after February 19, 2025, who would be denied citizenship under the order, along with their expectant mothers. Judge Laplante issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement against the entire class, calling the policy a clear violation of more than 125 years of settled constitutional law.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is lead counsel in the New Hampshire case, has urged the Supreme Court to deny review, with ACLU attorney Cody Wofsy describing the government’s legal arguments as “so flimsy they collapse under the slightest scrutiny.” He added, however, that if the justices do take the case, “we are more than ready to defeat President Trump in the Supreme Court.”
At the heart of the dispute is the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which 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.” For more than a century, that language has been understood — through the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark and dozens of subsequent rulings — to guarantee citizenship to virtually everyone born on American soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, with only narrow exceptions for children of foreign diplomats and invading armies.
The Trump administration argues that children born to non-citizens who are merely “subject to U.S. laws” are not truly “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States in the full sense intended by the amendment’s framers. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has told the Court that the lower-court rulings “invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president” and wrongly “confer the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”
Every federal judge and appeals panel to examine the order so far has rejected that interpretation. Even after the Supreme Court’s June 2025 decision sharply limiting the power of district judges to issue nationwide injunctions, challengers quickly pivoted to class-action lawsuits and multi-state litigation — formats the Court’s ruling explicitly left open — and secured new nationwide relief within weeks.
- The birthright citizenship fight is only the first of several Trump immigration initiatives to reach the Supreme Court for a merits ruling. Others remain in various stages of emergency litigation, including:
- The administration’s unprecedented peacetime invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to rapidly deport alleged members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang without immigration hearings (currently blocked in multiple jurisdictions).
- Federalization and deployment of National Guard troops from other states to conduct immigration raids in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland — deployments that have been temporarily or permanently halted by lower courts over Posse Comitatus Act and Tenth Amendment concerns.
- “Operation Midway Blitz” and similar large-scale enforcement surges that critics say rely on racial, linguistic, and occupational profiling.
With a 6-3 conservative majority, the Court has sent mixed signals on these emergency applications: lifting some lower-court stays, rejecting others, and repeatedly asking for additional briefing. Today’s conference on birthright citizenship will be the clearest indication yet of how far the Court is willing to go in accommodating — or rejecting — President Trump’s aggressive reinterpretation of executive authority over immigration and citizenship.
For now, every child born on American soil continues to be recognized as a U.S. citizen at birth, exactly as the law has provided since 1868. Whether that 157-year tradition survives into 2026 now rests with nine justices meeting behind closed doors.
