US Supreme Court set to rule on Trump’s birthright citizenship challenge

US President Donald Trump’s high-profile bid to end birthright citizenship is heading for a pivotal showdown at the Supreme Court on April 1, just over a month after the justices struck down a cornerstone of his tariff agenda.

The New York Post points out that the case, widely considered the most consequential on the court’s docket, will determine whether Trump has the authority to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants.

“This is a glaring red line for the Supreme Court justices that they don’t get to give away citizenship. They don’t have that power,” Mike Davis, a staunch Trump ally and founder of judicial advocacy group Article III Project, told The Post. “We the people never agreed to give this away.” He added, “These justices need to follow the law or they’re going to lose their legitimacy. There’s no more important of a case before the Supreme Court.”

Trump issued the executive order to end so-called birthright citizenship on his first day back in office last year. While he had considered the policy during his first administration, even conservative legal scholars were skeptical that the president could unilaterally reinterpret the 14th Amendment, which states that “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.”

Trump’s legal team argues that the key term “jurisdiction” excludes children of illegal immigrants, citing the 1884 Supreme Court ruling in Elk v. Wilkins, which limited birthright citizenship for Native Americans.

“Children of temporarily present aliens or illegal aliens are not ‘subject to’ the United States’ ‘jurisdiction,’ as the historical evidence—especially from the critical juncture immediately surrounding ratification—firmly shows,” the brief contends.

Opponents, however, say Trump’s order violates both the Constitution and statutory law, pointing to the Nationality Act of 1940, which consolidated nationality rules and explicitly guaranteed citizenship to children of Native Americans.

“The purpose of the Nationality Act was to gather all the rules about nationality to put them all in one place for comprehensiveness and clarity,” Gerald Neuman, a Harvard Law School professor specializing in immigration law, told The Post.

Lower courts have consistently struck down Trump’s executive order as illegal. Scholars cite precedent from the 1898 US v. Wong Kim Ark case, in which the Supreme Court confirmed that most native-born children automatically acquire citizenship.

Yet some legal analysts argue that the current case presents a novel question: it involves children of illegal immigrants or temporary visitors, categories not fully addressed by prior rulings.

“The court has never actually addressed the meaning of the 14th Amendment as applied to the two categories of persons at issue in the Trump executive order,” Ilan Wurman, a University of Minnesota law professor, told The Post.

The executive order’s reliance on presidential authority also complicates Trump’s case.

“It’s extremely solid,” Neuman said of the legal arguments against the order. “First of all, the precedent is very strong. And second of all, if you talk about it as a textualist, the key term in the Constitution is the arguments that are being put forward try to give jurisdiction a twisted meaning that it doesn’t normally have.”

Trump has framed the debate as a fight against “birth tourism” and illegal immigration, asserting on Truth Social that birthright citizenship “is about the BABIES OF SLAVES!” Critics argue that penalizing children for their parents’ immigration status contradicts both legal precedent and international norms.

As the Supreme Court prepares to weigh one of the most legally and politically charged issues in recent memory, the stakes extend far beyond domestic politics, touching on international perceptions of U.S. citizenship law and human rights.

By Sabina Mammadli