How the Supreme Court justices ruled on birthright citizenship

A majority of Supreme Court justices on Tuesday ruled to uphold birthright citizenship, citing the 14th Amendment as clearly enshrining jus soli, Latin for “right of the soil.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett sided with their three liberal counterparts to strike down President Trump’s January executive order aiming to thwart automatic citizenship granted to children born on U.S. soil.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented, while Justice Brett Kavanaugh disagreed with the majority decision but ultimately voted to block Trump’s order under federal law.

Roberts, who wrote the opinion for the court, said there was little evidence in support of the Trump administration’s position giving birthright citizenship exclusively to the descendants of citizens with legal status.

The chief justice noted America’s founding principles as proof that the Founding Fathers intended for the U.S. to welcome foreigners for short- or long-term residency.

“In a Nation of immigrants—an ‘asylum for mankind,’ in Thomas Paine’s words—jus soli’s broad scope took on particular importance,” Roberts wrote in the opinion for the court, citing Paine’s “Common Sense” pamphlet.

“The young Republic attracted tens of thousands of émigrés from the Old World—Scotch-Irish, French, German, Welsh, and many more, some of whom hoped to stay only a short time, others of whom hoped never to leave,” he added.

Roberts continued, “No matter their intentions, however, they could be assured that their children would be American citizens by birth alone.”

Alito and Thomas strongly disagreed, pushing back on the promise of citizenship for those not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. at the time of their child’s birth.

“The Citizenship Clause was consistently interpreted not to apply to the children of foreign temporary visitors, who were by definition not domiciled in the United States,” Thomas wrote.

“Regardless of administration or party, the Federal Government for decades after ratification regularly denied claims to citizenship by children who were born in the United States but not domiciled here,” he added.

Alito said the majority made a “serious mistake” in “one of the most important decisions in the history” of the Supreme Court.

“After the war, Congress finally adopted a constitutional provision, of the Fourteenth Amendment, making certain persons citizens at birth, but that provision differed substantially from the British rule,” Alito wrote in his dissent, referring to the Civil War.

“It specified that a person born here is not a citizen unless his allegiance to the United States is unimpaired by any obligations to a foreign power,” he added.