The Supreme Court ruled Tuesday (June 30), 6-3, that Donald Trump's attempt to end birthright citizenship cannot stand, striking down one of his signature second-term initiatives.

Five justices, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, found Trump's executive order violated the 14th Amendment directly.

A sixth, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, agreed the executive order could not take effect but concluded it conflicted with federal statutes enacted in 1940 and 1952 rather than the Constitution itself.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

But this case was never just about immigration policy. According to the National Immigration Law Center, birthright citizenship is a constitutional promise born directly out of America's reckoning with slavery, and the recent attacks on it represent "not just anti-immigrant" hostility, but "an assault on one of the most important legal safeguards Black Americans have ever won."

In the case of Trump v. Barbara, the Court held that children born in the U.S. to parents who are undocumented or only temporarily present are "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States and are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause, according to CNBC.

Roberts wrote in the majority opinion, per the official Supreme Court slip opinion: "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to 'every free-born person in this land.' We keep that promise today."

That phrase, "subject to the jurisdiction thereof," sits at the center of the entire legal fight. The Trump administration had argued the clause requires not just birth on U.S. soil, but proof that a child's parents were lawfully "domiciled" in the country, meaning they had established a permanent residence with intent to stay.

The Court found "scant evidence" to support that reading, pointing to historical sources from 1776 to 1868 that defined citizenship by birth without any domicile requirement.

That history matters specifically to Black Americans. The 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause was written in direct response to the Supreme Court's 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that Black people, free or enslaved, could never be U.S. citizens. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 to directly overturn that ruling.

According to NILC, Trump's executive order, signed his first day back in office, sought to redefine that clause in a way that, for the first time since Reconstruction, would have left some U.S.-born children without automatic citizenship.

NILC also drew a direct line between Trump's effort to end birthright citizenship and the racist "birther" conspiracy that launched his political career, which falsely questioned whether former President Barack Obama, the nation's first Black president, was actually born in the United States.

"These efforts echo a long tradition of using citizenship as a gatekeeping tool — one that has always harmed Black people first and worst," NILC wrote.

NILC further warned that ending birthright citizenship would have disproportionately endangered Black communities with immigrant roots, including Somali refugee families in Minnesota, Haitian parolees in Springfield, Ohio, and Venezuelan migrants in South Florida.

The organization also pointed to a troubling pattern it says is already emerging nationwide: U.S. citizens being detained or deported after immigration authorities refused to believe their documentation was legitimate, an echo, NILC noted, of a time when freed Black people were required to carry "freedom papers" just to prove they were no longer enslaved.

Tuesday's ruling marks another major Supreme Court setback for Trump's second-term agenda, following the Court's earlier decision striking down many of his tariffs in February and Monday's (June 29) separate ruling blocking him from immediately firing Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook.

For Black Americans, NILC argues, this win runs deeper than the headlines. "Defending birthright citizenship honors the constitutional promise made to Black people after slavery, which is that those who were born in this country have the right to claim it as their own," the law center wrote. "That promise must be safeguarded at all costs."

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