Supreme Court Upholds Birthright Citizenship, Trump Loses

For tens of thousands of Serbian families in the United States, the question the Supreme Court settled yesterday was no abstract legal debate but the concrete fate of their children. By a vote of six to three, the highest court in Washington affirmed on June 30 that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees American citizenship to nearly every child born on the country’s soil, regardless of the parents’ status. That verdict struck down the executive order Donald Trump signed on January 20, 2025, on the first day of his term, as one of the pillars of his immigration policy.

The ruling also touches Serbian guest workers on temporary status, students and workers on employment visas, whose children under Trump’s reading would have lost the right to automatic citizenship. The court concluded the opposite: children born to parents who are in the country unlawfully or temporarily are nonetheless subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore citizens under the Constitution itself.

Why is this ruling a tectonic defeat for the White House?

The defeat lies not only in the outcome but in the makeup of the majority. The opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and of the six conservative justices favored by the Republican camp, only one, Amy Coney Barrett, joined him. For a president who personally appointed three members of this court, that is painful arithmetic. Roberts wrote that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, deliberately extended the right of citizenship to every free-born person in the country, and that the executive cannot rewrite that meaning by decree.

Three justices dissented. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a ninety-one-page dissent arguing that the amendment was originally written to secure equal rights for freed slaves, and that its purpose was later stretched to serve political projects. His voice, however, remained in the minority.

Trump reacted almost immediately, calling the decision very bad for our country. Rather than accept the result, the president urged Congress to end birthright citizenship by statute, moving the fight from the judicial to the legislative arena. Such a move raises the question of the constitutionality of any future law, since the court has just declared that the guarantee rests in the Constitution itself, not in an ordinary provision a simple majority can repeal.

What the ruling changes in practice

For now, the legal situation returns to what prevailed before January 2025. Authorities may not withhold documents from children born in the country based on their parents’ status, and federal agencies that had begun enforcing the order must halt it. For the Serbian diaspora, numerous in Chicago, New York and the cities of the Midwest, that means a child born during a stay on a temporary visa keeps an American passport.

The broader message concerns the balance of power in Washington. The court showed there is a limit to how far an executive order can reshape constitutional guarantees, and that even a president with a loyal majority on the bench cannot count on automatic support when he touches the foundational text. Diplomatic channels in Belgrade are following this ruling closely, since it concerns the rights of Serbian citizens and their descendants in the largest diaspora.

Will the president truly try to change through Congress what the Supreme Court has just called a constitutional guarantee, or is this chapter of his immigration agenda now closed?