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On June 30, 2026, the Supreme Court ruled against President Donald Trump’s effort to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented people born inside the United States. In a 6-3 decision, which included Trump-picked, right-wing justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the majority upheld that birthright citizenship was guaranteed under the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment. The other Trump appointee, Neil Gorsuch, sided with the minority.
This is the third court ruling in U.S. history that has affirmed birthright citizenship in some way against challenges from white nationalists. The 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, reaffirmed that the U.S.-born children of noncitizen Chinese parents were citizens. In the 1982 Plyler v. Doe case, the Court again fended off another challenge by Texas public school officials who tried to remove undocumented schoolchildren from the rolls. They claimed that undocumented people were “foreign nationals” and therefore not “guaranteed equal protection of the law” since they were not under “U.S. jurisdiction.” The court rejected their claim and again re-affirmed birthright citizenship.
The failed claim that noncitizen people are not covered by constitutional protections because they are not under “U.S. jurisdiction” is the same line of argument Trump pursued during his first term. The difference this time is that Trump was banking on a majority right-wing Supreme Court — three of whom he appointed — to pass it based on loyalty to Trump himself, as much as on ideological grounds.
Trump’s strategy was based on a plan to radically reshape the federal judiciary and install a solidly MAGA-aligned core of judges that could enable his administration to push through reactionary policy shifts by validating his authoritarian “rule-through-executive-order” method. During his first term, Trump named 234 judicial nominees to seats on the most critical benches across the country, including 54 who “reshaped the ideological makeup of federal appeals courts and three who drove a generational shift in the highest court in the land.”
Into his second term, Trump is poised to potentially appoint 300 more federal judges as part of his effort to refashion the judiciary into a compliant and enabling force. This will set the stage for ending birthright citizenship under more favorable conditions. The defeat of his effort is attributable not to the public opposition from Democrats, who remain tacit and on the sidelines of the issue, but from within the ranks of the Republican Party itself.
The Trump regime’s attack on migrants, refugees, and undocumented people has been the central political strategy of the MAGA movement to activate and mobilize white nationalism, to tear down the existing legal architecture of past civil rights gains, and to weaponize the state to attack political opponents and repress popular resistance. Anti-immigration politics and campaigns have become dominant in U.S. politics as a result of surging white nationalist politics that have entered into the mainstream, most recently with the effort to dismantle birthright citizenship.
Trump first announced his crusade to end birthright citizenship during his first presidential primary campaign. During his first term, Trump claimed he was in the process of drafting an executive order to declare the end birthright citizenship through presidential decree. However, the order was never issued, as mass opposition to his policies weakened his administration and he failed to follow through with his major anti-immigrant initiatives. For instance, when Trump forced a shutdown of the federal government in early 2019 to force Democrats to fund his plan to expand the border wall, President of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA Sara Nelson threatened to organize a general strike of airline workers to close airports across the country. Trump folded.
Nevertheless, he was given a second opportunity to revive these initiatives in his second term.
Surge in White Nationalism Targeting Immigrants
The overturning of birthright citizenship has been a goal of the far right within the state since the advent of the so-called “war on terror” after 9/11 and the full-spectrum authoritarian turn against immigrants. Then-President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress oversaw the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 2003, and further initiated a now more than two-decades’ long bipartisan buildup of the world’s largest anti-immigrant state-repressive apparatus engineered into policy through hundreds of restrictive and punitive laws and executive orders passed through the federal and state governments.
State policy facilitated a surge in white nationalist and far right political movements against immigrants across the U.S. Gun-toting Minutemen groups organized “migrant hunts” at the Mexican border, in immigrant neighborhoods, and at sites where day laborers congregate to look for work; anti-immigrant think tanks such as NumbersUSA, the Center for Immigration Studies, and the Federation for American Immigration Reform, as well as political action committees like “Americans Against Illegal Immigration” sprang to life, bombarding the public with racist and xenophobic propaganda, and political opportunists of all partisan stripes hitched their wagons to the anti-immigrant crusade.
21st-Century Attempts to End Birthright Citizenship
Far right and openly racist agitator and opportunist Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) led an effort in Congress to organize the growing core of anti-immigrant Republicans into an anti-immigrant congressional caucus deceptively named the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus. The caucus’s goal was to promote racist and xenophobic politics, push restrictive and punitive laws to criminalize undocumented workers, and turn public opinion against immigrants. In its founding document, for instance, the group declared: “With the events of September 11th, in the second session of the 107th Congress, the caucus continued to establish and emphasize the link between open borders, unregulated immigration and the potential for terrorism.”
Their efforts culminated in a push through the Republican Party to platform the goal of ending birthright citizenship.
Ultimately, they met fierce resistance from the mass immigrant rights movement that developed and spread across the country in 2006 — which effectively blunted the far right campaign and enabled the Democrats to take back Congress and then the presidency by 2008 with the promise of granting citizenship to the undocumented. Yet, once in power, President Barack Obama and the new Democratic majority in Congress walked back their pledge and followed the Republican playbook in building up the immigrant state repressive apparatus — significantly increasing funding for ICE and Border Patrol, and ramping up detention and deportation. While Obama created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals through executive order before leaving office, it excluded most undocumented people, reinforced the “good immigrant/bad immigrant” narrative of who deserves citizenship, and was rescinded for new applicants by Trump once in office.
Joe Biden was also elected in 2020 making the same campaign promise for legalization, only to again shift to anti-immigration once in power. For example, Biden maintained Trump’s invocation of the Title 42 health provision of the Public Health Service Act of 1944, which allowed U.S. authorities to expel migrants at the border without allowing them to seek asylum based on the racist notion that they “spread disease.”
In both cases, the failures of the Democratic Party resulted in Trump, who capitalized on the demoralization of the Democratic Party base. Trump went on to build the whole “MAGA” brand by deploying the most venal, hateful, cruel, and deadly measures against immigrants, while building up the state repressive forces against immigrants to an unprecedented level.
Upon taking office for his second term on January 20, 2025, one of his first acts was to issue Executive Order 14160, officially titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which aimed to stop recognizing these U.S.-born children as citizens — ending birthright citizenship. This is a core policy objective of Project 2025, which is the far right playbook that Trump has followed page-by-page during his second term.
Division in the Republican Party
The split within the Trump-aligned ranks in the Supreme Court that have emerged in the ruling on birthright citizenship can be attributed to larger divides emerging within the Republican Party on the question of immigration. The dominant Trump wing of far right, neo-fascist, and reactionary white nationalist forces now in control of the party and state have pursued more extreme and punitive measures to try to detain and expel a large share of the immigrant population from the country.
This has produced tensions within the sectors of the capitalist class that want and need to maintain access to a large pool of undocumented labor, albeit one still criminalized and without citizenship, making it harder to form or join unions, and therefore more vulnerable and exploitable. These opposing views of “how far to go” in the pursuit of anti-immigrant policies before harming the interests of capitalism itself are now coming out into the open. This tension is revealing itself in how more representatives within the minority wing of the Republican party, that directly administer the political interests of capital first, are pushing back against what they consider the impacts of Trump’s policies that have become detrimental to the capitalist class. Ending birthright citizenship would undoubtedly have a seismic impact on the capitalist economy. More workers without status would leave the country, and fewer would migrate into a caste-like existence in the U.S. as permanent laborers without any rights. The U.S. capitalist class does not appear willing to risk such a drastic loss in profit.
Building an Immigrant Rights Movement to Stop Trump
Despite the opposition from the minority wing within his own party, Donald Trump and his MAGA movement will not give up on the matter and will likely shift strategy to again pursue the effort to end birthright citizenship. For example, while the measure didn’t pass this time around, right-wing Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch stated that “they did not see birthright citizenship as a constitutional right for certain groups,” potentially foreshadowing another approach that Trump could take. Trump himself declared he would “go to Congress next” to find a way to end birthright citizenship.
For Trump to retreat, there would need to be an opposition that is able to counter his narratives and demonstrate power on a meaningful scale. The leadership of the Democratic Party has shown that it is not that opposition. Even as we approach the midterm elections, the Democratic Party has not unified around an alternative program or plan to challenge anti-immigrant policy.
The main force of opposition to Trump’s war has to come from the organized working class resisting the attacks by ICE around the country. For example, the mass resistance of people from Minneapolis to “Operation Metro Surge” in early 2026 developed into neighborhood defense groups against ICE raids and kidnappings, and culminated in a mass strike on January 23 that shut down large parts of the economy, ultimately forcing a retreat and withdrawal of the ICE surge. Building protest movements, anti-ICE defense committees, workplace and neighborhood support networks, and mutual aid campaigns, and by organizing working-class power into sustained political movements that include walkouts, shutdowns, and strikes are the only way that we can beat back and weaken Trumpism and bring an end to his reign of terror against immigrants.
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