The American Immigration Council is a non-profit, non-partisan organization. Thanks to the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, Team USA has made it to the Round of 16 at the 2026 World Cup. Team USA’s leading scorer, Folarin Balogun, was born in July 2001 to a Nigerian British mother who happened to be visiting New York City when she gave birth (after the airline denied her boarding on a return flight to London because of her advanced pregnancy). Folarin Balogun grew up in the United Kingdom. But the happenstance of his birth on U.S. soil allowed him to play for Team USA. If the Supreme Court had agreed with the Trump administration in its birthright citizenship decision this week, a future Balogun would not be considered a U.S. citizen. Fortunately, the Supreme Court on June 30 struck down the Trump birthright citizenship order, preserving — for now — the guarantee of citizenship enshrined in Constitution.
The Supreme Court decided Trump v. Barbara nearly 18 months after President Trump signed an executive order purporting to deny birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants or those in the country lawfully but temporarily. Along the way, every court to consider the executive order found it unconstitutional. A year ago, the Supreme Court dodged the issue of the executive order’s legality to focus on the lower courts’ ability to issue so-called “universal” injunctions. The extended time it took for highest court to finally confirm that the Constitution means what it says allowed dubious scholarship and revisionist history to creep into what had been considered a settled guarantee for more than 125 years. In the end, the Court reached the correct result, if narrowly.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority decision that struck down the executive order. Six justices—in addition to Roberts, Justices Barrett, Kavanaugh, Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson—agreed that the order was unlawful. But only five of those justices believed that it violated the Constitution. Justice Kavanaugh wrote separately to opine that the executive order only ran afoul of a federal law, which could be changed by Congress, but that it was not unconstitutional (by contrast, a constitutional amendment requires a much more onerous process). While many have correctly pointed out that Justice Kavanaugh has extended an invitation for Congress to legislate a narrower right to citizenship, the current Court would find that a more restrictive view of citizenship that excludes children like those targeted by the executive order violates the Constitution.
In the main opinion for the Court, Chief Justice Roberts traced the history of birthright citizenship from English common law through the founding of the United States. He noted that it consistently meant that those born in this country, with limited exceptions, were considered U.S. citizens from birth. Black Americans, both enslaved and free, were a notable exception. Most infamously, the Court’s 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandfordheld an enslaved person as well as the descendants of enslaved persons could never be U.S. citizens. As the Barbara court put it, under Dred Scott, “blood, not soil, was made the rule.”
The horrors of the Civil War and the promise of Reconstruction led to the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which stated concisely and powerfully, “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. . .” Chief Justice Roberts noted that the 14th Amendment was meant to “permanently enshrine” the guarantee of citizenship, independent of the whims of any Congress.
This understanding has been confirmed, the Court noted, through more than 125 years of caselaw, most notably the Court’s 1898 decision in Wong Kim Ark. “What the Court held in Wong Kim Ark was simple: the Citizenship Clause incorporated the common law and granted citizenship to nearly all children born in the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote.
Justice Thomas wrote a 91-page dissent, joined by Justice Gorsuch. Both the majority and the dissent agreed that the 14th Amendment was meant to remedy Dred Scott, but the agreement stopped there. In Justices Thomas’ telling, the 14th Amendment “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.” This primary dissent cherrypicked from the historical record and advanced a theory that “subject to the jurisdiction” actually contained a requirement of “domicile,” or a permanent residence, in the United States—a gloss found nowhere in the 14th Amendment.
Justice Jackson, in her concurrence, refuted the cramped vision of the 14th Amendment that Justice Thomas advanced, noting that it “bears little relationship to the history of its ratification” and “elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery.” The majority opinion, too, cited historical evidence that the children of those from foreign nations, including disfavored nations, were explicitly contemplated in the debates around the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the predecessor to the 14th Amendment.
Justice Alito separately dissented, infusing his opinion with policy arguments against immigration and raising the specter of “birth tourism.” In a separate short dissent, Justice Gorsuch suggested that in some cases, the children of undocumented immigrants could be considered “domiciled” here.
The majority and dissenters presented two fundamentally different visions of U.S. citizenship. To the dissenters, it “devalues” U.S. citizenship for the 14th Amendment to embrace as citizens the children of those here unlawfully or temporarily. To the majority, any paring back of birthright citizenship would betray the meaning of the 14th Amendment, and what it has made our country today.
As affirming as it is to celebrate Balogun’s story, there is danger in basing law and policy on outlier cases. His trajectory is not common, and no one should have to be an international soccer star to prove their status or worth as a U.S. citizen. Indeed, it is the dissenters in the Barbara case who seek to eviscerate a core constitutional guarantee based on random stories of “birth tourism”—which the Solicitor General, at oral argument before the Court, admitted he had no hard evidence to support.
In rejecting the Trump administration’s efforts to pare back a core constitutional guarantee just days before the nation’s 250th anniversary, the Supreme Court’s affirmation that the 14th Amendment means what it says is even more important. It means that those who are born here are citizens alike, rather than having to prove it on an individual basis. That, the Supreme Court decided, is fundamentally American.
