Attempting to End Birthright Citizenship by Executive Order: A Direct Challenge to the 14th Amendment Blocked by Every Court That Reviewed It

On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship." The order directed federal agencies to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in the United States if both parents were not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. Specifically, the order targeted two categories: children born to mothers who were unlawfully present in the United States and children born to mothers who were lawfully but temporarily present, such as those on student visas, work visas, or tourist visas.

The executive order directly challenged the prevailing interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." Since the Supreme Court's 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, this clause has been understood to guarantee citizenship to virtually all persons born on U.S. soil, regardless of the immigration status of their parents.

The executive order was immediately challenged in federal court by multiple parties, including state attorneys general, immigrant rights organizations, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Every federal court that considered the challenges struck the order down. As of February 2025, four federal judges had issued preliminary injunctions blocking the order's implementation and enforcement nationwide. The judges found that the order was likely unconstitutional and that its enforcement would cause irreparable harm to affected families.

Constitutional scholars across the political spectrum criticized the order. Conservative legal scholars who had otherwise supported the Trump administration's immigration enforcement priorities stated that the 14th Amendment's text was clear and that birthright citizenship could not be eliminated by executive action. The Federalist Society's own scholars were divided, with several prominent members stating that the order was unconstitutional. Liberal constitutional scholars uniformly condemned it. The bipartisan consensus among legal experts was that any change to birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, not an executive order.

The litigation produced two distinct Supreme Court actions, which are often conflated. On June 27, 2025, in Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Court ruled 6 to 3 that federal courts generally may not issue universal injunctions broader than the relief needed for the plaintiffs before them, and it narrowed the nationwide injunctions on that procedural ground. That decision did not address whether the executive order was constitutional. On remand, a federal court in New Hampshire certified a nationwide class of affected children and issued a class-wide injunction that kept the order blocked. The Court reached the merits a year later. On June 30, 2026, in Trump v. Barbara, the Court held 6 to 3, in an opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment, and it reaffirmed United States v. Wong Kim Ark. Executive Order 14160 was struck down.

The executive order never went into effect, and no child was denied birthright citizenship under its terms. Five weeks after the Supreme Court struck it down, the president signed a new executive order concerning birthright citizenship, which is documented separately in POWER-037. The attempt to override a constitutional guarantee through executive action alone, without legislation or a constitutional amendment, was rejected by every court that reviewed it, including the Supreme Court on the merits.

The Trump administration argued that the Citizenship Clause's phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" was not intended to encompass the children of individuals who are present in the United States unlawfully or temporarily, and that the 14th Amendment's framers intended to guarantee citizenship only to children of persons with a permanent allegiance to the United States. Some legal scholars, including John Eastman and others associated with the originalist movement, have argued that the historical understanding of "jurisdiction" at the time of the 14th Amendment's ratification supported a narrower reading. The administration contended that the executive order was a legitimate exercise of the president's authority to interpret and enforce constitutional provisions. However, the overwhelming consensus of constitutional scholarship holds that United States v. Wong Kim Ark resolved this question in 1898, establishing that birth on U.S. soil confers citizenship with extremely limited exceptions for children of foreign diplomats and hostile occupying forces. Every federal court to review the executive order agreed with this reading. The attempt to override a constitutional amendment through executive order, without legislative action or a new constitutional amendment, represented one of the most aggressive assertions of unilateral executive power in modern American history.

On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court held Executive Order 14160 invalid under the Fourteenth Amendment in Trump v. Barbara, a final adjudication on the merits. The earlier Supreme Court decision in Trump v. CASA, Inc. (June 27, 2025) is frequently described as a birthright-citizenship ruling, but it decided only the scope of universal injunctions and did not reach the constitutional question, and that distinction is preserved above. The order was blocked by every court that reviewed it and was ultimately struck down.

The slip opinion in Trump v. Barbara was not directly retrievable for this entry, so the holding language above is drawn from SCOTUSblog's report of the decision and is corroborated by the case's docket, date, and authorship in the Supreme Court's public records, and by the citation, 146 S. Ct. 2438 (2026), that appears in the administration's own subsequent executive order. Five weeks after this ruling, the president signed a new executive order concerning birthright citizenship, which is documented in POWER-037.