play Live Sign upShow navigation menuplay Live Click here to searchsearchSign upNews|Donald Trump‘Hits close to home’: US Supreme Court hears birthright citizenship caseCase could determine future of century-old practice of infants being born in US automatically being granted citizenship.
twitterwhatsappcopylinkgoogleAdd Al Jazeera on GoogleinfoDemonstrators hold signs outside the US Supreme Court building in Washington, DC [File: Kylie Cooper/Reuters]By Joseph StepanskyPublished On 1 Apr 20261 Apr 2026Washington, DC – The United States Supreme Court has heard oral arguments on the administration of US President Donald Trump’s effort to end the longstanding practice of granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
Hundreds of protesters, many associated with civil rights and immigration advocacy groups, gathered in front of the country’s top court during the proceedings, in which challenging lawyers argued that the Trump administration’s plan, laid out in an executive order signed on January 20, 2025, ran counter to the US Constitution and subsequent federal law.
Lawyers for the Trump administration, in contrast, argued that more than a century of US practice had been based on a “misreading” of the US Constitution, as they maintained that citizenship should not be granted to infants born to parents living in the US without documentation or those on “temporary” legal statuses.
Underscoring the significance of the case to the administration, which has pursued a slate of hardline deportation and immigration policies, was the attendance of US President Donald Trump at Wednesday’s hearing. That made Trump the first sitting president in US history to attend oral arguments at the Supreme Court.
“This hits close to home,” said Luis Villaguzman, a 21-year-old student fellow with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) from Riverside, California, who was among those gathered in front of the court. “Specifically when it comes to immigrants … mothers, who are pregnant, about to give birth … they will lose benefits and truly just lose a hope – a future in America.”
He saw Trump’s unprecedented attendance at the Supreme Court as a “show of force” to sway the judges. The court currently holds a 6-3 conservative supermajority, which includes three justices appointed by Trump in his first term.
The panel has ruled in Trump’s favour on several immigration decisions, but has also delivered the president a handful of major defeats in recent weeks.
Roslyne Shiao, 46, from Montclair, New Jersey, also saw Trump’s attendance as trying to “sway the court in his favour”.
“So the people need to be here,” said Shiao, who held a sign that read “born here belong here”.
For his part, Trump stood up and abruptly departed in the middle of the hearing on Wednesday, writing on his Truth Social account moments later: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”.
At least 30 countries have practices similar to the US on birthright citizenship, according to the Pew Research Center.
While no demonstrations were organised in support of Trump’s action on Wednesday, one longtime supporter of the theory, law professor John Eastman, attended the hearing.
He told The New York Times he was “impressed” by the arguments of both sides, adding the hearing “proves that it’s not a radical fringe idea”.
Trump adviser Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s hardline immigration policies, on X wrote that “birthright citizenship means the children of illegal aliens can vote to tax your children and seize their inheritance”.
The Supreme Court was not set to issue a ruling in the case until later this year. Still, Wednesday’s hearing offered a window into the justice’s thinking towards the arguments put forth by both sides.
Beginning the proceedings, Solicitor General John Sauer maintained the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1868, has been misinterpreted to say that all people born in the US – regardless of their parents’ legal status – are automatically US citizens.
The text reads: “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Sauer argued that “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” opens the door to precluding some immigrant groups from birthright citizenship, further arguing that previous rulings indicate the amendment should apply only to those with “allegiance to the United States by virtue of domicile”.
He equated the status with legal permanent residency in the US.
Sauer further charged that the current standard of birthright citizenship “demeans the priceless and profound gift of American citizenship” and incentivises individuals to travel to the US to give birth.
Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of several groups challenging Trump’s executive order, in turn, argued that the president’s efforts run blatantly counter to the clear language in the amendment, which she argued was reaffirmed in the United States v Wong Kim Ark case in 1898 and later codified in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.
“That rule was enshrined in the 14th Amendment to put it out of reach of any government official to destroy,” she said.
She argued that the framers of the Constitution and later Congress would have included explicit language narrowing the amendment’s scope if that was their intent.
Wang further warned that the president’s order would create a bureaucratic nightmare while raising questions about a potentially shifting threshold for when infants are citizens at birth.
“The citizenship of millions of Americans, past, present and future could be called into question,” she said.
The justices pursued several lines of questioning, with particular emphasis on Sauer’s claim that birthright citizenship only applies to those with “allegiance” to the US by being “domiciled” in the country.
“Who is domiciled? I’m struggling to figure out who is domiciled,” Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, a liberal appointed by former President Joe Biden.
In another exchange with ACLU lawyer Wang, conservative Justice Samuel Alito noted that the term “domicile” appears repeatedly in the Wong Kim Ark case, which has long been viewed as affirming birthright citizenship.
“Isn’t it at least something to be concerned about to say that, since it’s discussed 20 different times and has that significant role in the opinion that you can just dismiss it as irrelevant?” he asked.
Questioning Sauer, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by Trump, questioned why Congress had not included language more clearly delineating which infants were automatically granted citizenship if that was their intent in the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.
“One might have expected Congress to use a different phrase if it wanted to try to disagree with Wong Kim Ark on what the scope of birthright citizenship or the scope of citizenship should be, and yet Congress repeats that same language, knowing what the interpretation had been,” Kavanaugh said.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another Trump appointee, pointed to the potentially chaotic situations Trump’s executive order would create.
“I can imagine it being messy in some applications,” said Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
She later asked: “What if you don’t know who the parents are?”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a liberal appointed by former President Barack Obama, also questioned how much upheaval the order would cause.
She asked what would stop the administration’s position – if the court rules in its favour – from being applied retroactively to current US citizens.
“You asked us to concentrate only on the prospective nature of the executive order, but the logic of your position, if accepted, is that this president, or the next president, or a Congress, or someone else, could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective,” she said.
For his part, Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative appointed by former President George W Bush, said the Trump administration was arguing that undocumented immigrants fell under the narrow scope of individuals currently not granted birthright citizenship – which only includes the children of diplomats, foreign invading armies, and Native American Tribes.
“I’m not quite sure how you can get to that big group from such tiny and sort of idiosyncratic examples.”
Back outside of the court, Deborah Fleischaker, a senior adviser for immigration policy and strategy at UnidosUS, a Latino civil rights organisation, said you “cannot underestimate the importance of today’s hearing”.
Trump’s order would “disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of children every year, many of whom are Latino,” she told Al Jazeera, while creating administrative “chaos” in the largely decentralised system in the US of registering births.
A joint analysis by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) and Penn State’s Population Research Institute found that Trump’s executive order would affect about 255,000 infants born in the US every year, arguing that it would create “a self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass”.
“I connect this to [Trump’s] mass deportation campaign,” Fleischaker said. “The Trump administration is looking to make people undocumented and then be able to remove them to meet their goals of deporting a million people a year.”
Julia Ellagood-Pfaff, a 63-year-old US Army veteran, was also among those gathered in opposition on Wednesday.
“It makes sense to protect our borders, but getting rid of birthright citizenship … is not upholding the Constitution,” she said.
“And I took an oath to support and defend the Constitution.”
