FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 30, 2026
CONTACT
Lilly Gonzalez, media@nipnlg.org
Washington, DC — National Immigration Project Executive Director Sirine Shebaya issued the following statement after the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara, that President Trump’s January 20, 2025 executive order denying citizenship to certain children born in the United States violates the Fourteenth Amendment:
"Since the Supreme Court took this case, we have been holding our breath – today, we exhale, but our relief feels tempered and temporary. A bedrock constitutional protection, one with its roots in this country’s repudiation of slavery and its promise of equal citizenship for everyone born here, survived intact. But where the Fourteenth Amendment should have prevailed 9-0, instead only 5 justices raised their voices and pens to protect it, and only by a vote of 6 to 3, did the Supreme Court tell this president he could not erase birthright citizenship by decree.
This executive order was never really about citizenship policy. It was about power—about testing whether a president can simply declare a constitutional provision means something other than what it says, and dare the courts to stop him. Today they did. But this should have been the easiest case the Court heard all year. The fact that this was a fight at all should trouble us as much as the outcome relieves us. Four justices—three in dissent, plus a fourth who agreed with the result but rejected the constitutional reasoning entirely—would not say plainly that the executive order violates the Constitution. That fact deserves as much attention as birthright citizenship prevailing.
There were children at the center of this case who had their citizenship litigated, argued over, and rejected outright by three sitting justices. That sends its own message, regardless of today’s outcome—that some American children are seen as conditionally American.
This comes one week after the Court handed down two racist rulings, gutting Temporary Protected Status and the right to even ask for asylum at the border. A Court comfortable ignoring the face value of troves of vile statements disdaining an entire people is equally comfortable rendering decades of settled precedent meaningless on a whimsy. Part of today’s dissent leaned heavily on amicus briefs filed by U.S. senators and a coalition of Republican state attorneys general, not historians, not legal scholars, but elected politicians who share this administration’s position and who jockey to kiss the ring. That is not how constitutional law is supposed to work.
We are watching this country move, decision by decision, toward becoming an authoritarian, white supremacist autocracy. Today’s decision lets us hold on to increasingly slippery hope that we are not there yet. But it does not undo the devastation that this administration has wrought in less than two years, wielding the executive branch like a scythe to cut down public health, international aid and relations, environmental protections, and the social safety net, and like a cudgel to batter us into compliance. Our work gives us the clearest view of how the federal government has harmed immigrants, expanding deadly detention, erasing due process, and trampling basic human rights. Birthright citizenship was one front in that fight. It will not be the last.
It is worth remembering why the protection of birthright citizenship exists in the first place. The 14th Amendment arose out of the wreckage of slavery and Dred Scott, rejecting the nefarious idea that allowed human bondage for so long, and instead proclaiming what we now take to be our most central, our most sacred shared value: that all people are born equal. Justice Jackson’s concurrence, a work of true constitutional scholarship and unyielding principle, illustrates the importance of this history: 'Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people,' she reminded the Court, so that, as Frederick Douglass so beautifully said, 'the glorious birthright of our common humanity, will become the inheritance of all the inhabitants of this highly favored country.'"
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The National Immigration Project is a membership organization of attorneys, advocates, and community members who believe that all people should be treated with dignity, live freely, and flourish. We litigate, advocate, educate, and build bridges across movements to ensure that those most impacted by the immigration and criminal systems are uplifted and supported. Learn more at nipnlg.org. Follow the National Immigration Project on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads at @NIPNLG.