US supreme court upholds birthright citizenship in blow to Trump agenda

Court rules against Trump administration on policy that people born in the United States are citizens The US supreme court has upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, affirming that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens and rejecting a central pillar of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. The president had issued an executive order on the first day of his second term that sought to deny automatic citizenship to the children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary foreign residents. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said this order violated the 14th amendment of the US constitution. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights – to freely participate in our political community,” wrote Roberts. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.” Roberts was joined by the liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, and the conservative justice Amy Coney Barrett. The conservative justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the judgment but dissented in part, arguing that the executive order violated fed