July 1, 2026 Story by: Editor
The U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision reaffirming birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment produced one of the term’s sharpest exchanges between two of the Court’s newest and longest-serving justices, as Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Clarence Thomas offered starkly different visions of the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause.
In a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday, June 39, the Court rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present in the country.
Trump argued the amendment ratified in 1868 after the Civil War was intended to protect the rights of the children of slaves, not of the temporary visitors or undocumented immigrants he sought to exclude.
Justice Thomas, in his dissent, said that Congress overruled Dred Scott with the 1866 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment. But he argued that neither provision provided citizenship to visitors.
Justices Thomas and Jackson each focused in part on the Court’s 1857 decision, Dred Scott v Sandford, which held that people of African descent who were enslaved, and their descendants, could not be U.S. citizens and therefore could not claim the rights and privileges of citizenship.
Majority opinion:
Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion, which ruled that the executive order issued by Trump at the start of his second term violated the 14th amendment of the constitution.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community,” wrote Roberts. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
The decision preserves more than a century of constitutional precedent established in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898).
Justice Jackson concurring opinion:
Although Justice Jackson joined the majority, she wrote a separate concurring opinion emphasizing what she viewed as the broader constitutional significance of citizenship. Jackson described citizenship as “the right to have rights,” arguing that the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee extends equally to all people born on U.S. soil who are subject to the nation’s laws.
“The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” she wrote, arguing that the minority’s view “pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing. Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
“Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship,” Jackson wrote.
She criticized historical arguments seeking to narrow the amendment’s reach and warned against interpretations that would undermine its Reconstruction-era promise of equal citizenship.
In her writing, Jackson noted that “after the Civil War, Fredrick Douglass frequently reflected on the events of the time through the lens of biblical stories”; she said that in one speech, “Douglass declared that his own aim was to ‘show that nations should have memories’”.
“In the time since Douglass’s prescient observation, Americans have come to learn that fading memories are not the only danger,” she wrote. “The distortion of historical facts – retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims – may be an even greater threat.”
“Yet here we are,” she continued. “The Government, the principal dissent, and a handful of revisionist commentators now vigorously promote an interpretation of the Citizenship Clause that diverges sharply not only from what the text says, but also from the historical record as interpreted by the keepers of ‘the call of remembrance’ (trained historians).”
“What is more, this alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” she added. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people. And the Great Emancipator eventually foresaw 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.”
Justice Thomas dissenting opinion:
Justice Thomas authored the primary 91-page dissent, arguing that the majority’s interpretation was historically inaccurate. He contended that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause was designed specifically to secure equal rights for freed slaves, who owed exclusive allegiance to the U.S. and had no other homeland, rather than as a broad mechanism to grant citizenship to children of foreign nationals
“Blacks were entitled to citizenship because they were Americans,” Thomas wrote. “They had no other homeland, owed no allegiance to any foreign power, and were subject to no other authority. They ‘fought and bled in the same battles,’ ‘gained and gloried in the same victories,’ and were ‘liable to be called upon to defend [America] in time of war’ alongside every other citizen.”
“The Citizenship Clause thus guaranteed them the ‘dignity and glory of American citizenship,’ so as to ensure that they would never be treated as second class under the law,” he wrote. “The same could not be said for the children of foreign temporary visitors. Foreign temporary visitors were attached to their home country, lacked similar bonds to this country, and would not be called upon in time of war.”
Drawing extensively from congressional debates surrounding the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, historical legal treatises and 19th-century State Department opinions, Thomas argued that “subject to the jurisdiction” historically meant complete political allegiance and domicile rather than mere physical presence within U.S. territory.
The justices’ disagreement:
The contrasting opinions underscore the Court’s enduring divide over constitutional interpretation. Jackson’s concurrence reflects a living constitutional approach that emphasizes the amendment’s purpose of securing equal rights after the Civil War, while Thomas’ dissent relies on originalist principles rooted in historical understandings of citizenship and allegiance at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification.
The ruling represents a major legal setback for the Trump administration’s effort to narrow birthright citizenship through executive action.
By affirming that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are citizens at birth, the Court reinforced longstanding constitutional precedent while highlighting the deep philosophical divisions that continue to shape the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Constitution.
Source: The Guardian / The Hill
