President Donald Trump suffered a defeat on Tuesday at the US Supreme Court in the dispute over birthright citizenship as the court, in a landmark ruling, said children born in the United States will continue to obtain citizenship automatically.
Trump had sought to remove birthright citizenship for the children of people in the US only temporarily or without the required authorization.
Critics argued that the 14th amendment to the US Constitution does not allow that. It states that babies born on US soil are US citizens.
"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," the text of the ruling read.
The jus soli - Latin for "right of the soil" - has guaranteed automatic citizenship since 1868 for almost every child born on US territory. The Supreme Court justices have now confirmed this practice with their ruling.
The majority of the justices agreed. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative and often a swing vote, wrote the main opinion and was joined by the court's liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Trump appointee Amy Coney Barrett also signed on to the majority opinion - a move that is likely to irk her conservative critics.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a Trump appointee, concurred in the judgement but dissented in part. Opposing the ruling were court conservatives Neil Gorsuch, also a Trump appointee, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas
Court watchers had anticipated that the justices would reject Trump's effort to alter the law, based on the hearing on the case in which many justices, including conservative ones, did not appear likely to back Trump's move to modify US citizenship laws.
Trump's efforts to curb who is a US citizen
At the beginning of his second term, Trump signed an order aimed at sharply restricting birthright citizenship and prohibiting children to parents in the US only temporarily or without valid residence papers from obtaining citizenship.
This was intended to stop babies of migrants without valid residency status, including those of asylum seekers, foreign students, tourists or foreigners sent to the US by companies on a temporary basis, from automatically receiving US citizenship. Trump also wanted to clamp down on "birth tourism" - people who travel to the US only to give birth there.
Trump claimed the "14th amendment was never interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States."
The Supreme Court disagreed.
What stopped Trump so far
Trump's order has not taken effect so far because of blocks by lower courts. Several organizations filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump administration.
The case shakes the foundations of the US self-image as a nation of immigrants. Critics saw the plan as violating the 14th amendment and warned of the creation of a group of children born in the US without secure status.
Penn State University projections show that ending birthright citizenship for US-born children with parents who are either unauthorized or are temporary immigrants (or a combination of the two) would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075.
Each year, over the next 50 years, an average of about 255,000 children born on US soil would start life without US citizenship based on their parents’ legal status, the research shows.
This creation of a class of US-born residents deprived of the rights that citizenship conveys to their neighbours, classmates and work colleagues could sow the seeds for significant disruption to economic mobility and social cohesion in the years and decades ahead, in the assessment by Penn State University.
