Trump dealt major blow with birthright citizenship ruling
episodePreviously titled “Birthright citizenship survives in major SCOTUS ruling” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What were the Supreme Court's headline rulings at the end of the term?
Another Supreme Court term is in the books. In its final decisions on Tuesday, the high court upheld birthright citizenship, the principle that guarantees that all children born in the United States are citizens, dealing a major blow to President Donald Trump on one of his signature issues. On another landmark issue, however, the president was given a major win. The court's ruling will allow states, West Virginia and Idaho specifically, to ban transgender athletes from participating on a female sports team. Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Wednesday, July 1st, 2026. Here to help me break down this momentous decision day for SCOTUS is USA Today Justice Department correspondent Asha Bakshi.
Asha, it's always good to have you on.
Thanks, Dana. I'm happy to be here.
In its decision on birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump on Tuesday. What was the breakdown for and against, and what justifications did the majority give for its decision?
Essentially, there were six justices who ruled against Trump, but five who did that in a kind of unified way, and then three who would have ruled for him. The lead opinion, the majority opinion, was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. He was joined by the three liberals on the court, as well as Justice Amy Coney Barrett. And basically, they said that the order from President Trump was unconstitutional. that it violated the 14th Amendment, which includes this really crucial clause about citizenship, saying that all people born in this country and subject to U.S. jurisdiction are citizens. And then you had Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who said he didn't think that the Trump order was unconstitutional.
He thought it was compatible with that amendment, but said that he thought the order was incompatible with a congressional statute. And so he said Congress could come in And changed the meaning of citizenship, but Trump or any other president couldn't do that on their own. And then you had the dissenters who said that it was constitutional, that it conformed with federal statutes, and they would have upheld the order entirely.
Were you surprised by the ruling at all?
I was not surprised by the ruling, to be honest. When you listen back to the Supreme Court oral arguments in this case, I listened to them live at the time. The justices had tough questions for both sides in this case, but they had especially tough questions for the Trump administration. And when you look at the vote breakdown, it's not too surprising. You have the three liberals and the more kind of moderate justices on the court, John Roberts and Oftentimes, Amy Coney Barrett in the majority. And then Brett Kavanaugh taking kind of a middling position. He tends to be someone who can float between two sides sometimes. And then the three most conservative justices in the dissent. So it wasn't too surprising.
And I can dig in a little into what the justices were actually saying. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, he talked about basically the history of citizenship in the United States. He said, if you go back to the time of the country's founding, that we adopted an understanding of citizenship that came from English common law. That's basically English law that judges create. And the idea was that people who were born on the soil, not a matter of their blood, if they're born on the soil of a country, then they have citizenship. And he said it was really in the time leading up to the Civil War that the Supreme Court started to contradict that principle. It issued this infamous decision, Dred Scott, that essentially said Black people in the
And Chief Justice Roberts basically wrote that when the 14th Amendment was ratified, that was in 1868 after the Civil War, it was trying to repudiate that Dred Scott decision that he described as odious to say not just that Black people are citizens of the United States, but basically to go back to this idea that people are citizens because they're on this soil, that English common law idea, repudiate the whole idea of trying to undercut
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