Open Society Justice Initiative Welcomes U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Upholding Birthright Citizenship

NEW YORK—The Open Society Justice Initiative welcomes today’s U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. Barbara blocking Executive Order 14,160 and preserving birthright citizenship. The ruling is a vital reprieve for everyone, including those children who faced the immediate threat of exclusion from citizenship at birth. It affirms the core promise of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that “[a]ll persons born... in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Since the amendment’s ratification in 1868, birthright citizenship has stood as a constitutional guarantee of equal protection and a foundation of the post-Civil War democratic order.

It is notable and disappointing that the court reached this important result by a narrow and fractured path, with a slim majority of the court recognizing the constitutional guarantee.

“This ruling prevents an immediate and devastating attack on the Fourteenth Amendment,” said James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, “but the closeness of the decision is itself alarming. The Fourteenth Amendment was written to put citizenship beyond the reach of political whim or executive power. A constitutional guarantee this fundamental should survive with unanimity, not by a thread.”

The consequences of a contrary ruling would have been profound. Children born in the United States to affected parents would have been pushed into legal limbo, creating a multi-generational subclass denied equal citizenship, legal identity, and basic protections. Some could have faced deportation even where a parent remained lawfully in the country. Others risked being rendered stateless, a condition in which no country recognizes a person as its national. The United States provides no clear process for determining statelessness, no dedicated protection status, and no assured pathway to citizenship, leaving affected children with no route to legal belonging anywhere.

“Citizenship by birth on the territory, or jus soli, is the most protective safeguard against inherited exclusion,” said Natasha Arnpriester, senior legal counsel of the Open Society Justice Initiative. “Today’s decision preserves that principle, but the separate opinions show that the threat has not passed. The right to nationality and a child’s most basic right to belong must not depend on a political moment or parentage alone.”

The majority rightly rejected an effort to redefine constitutional citizenship by executive order. But the concurring and dissenting opinions also reveal a continuing campaign to make citizenship conditional on such things as bloodline, immigration status, race, and ancestry, rather than equal at birth.

History shows where ancestry-based citizenship leads. Governments have repeatedly used the law to ration belonging by bloodline: Nazi Germany’s Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews of citizenship and tied legal status to ancestry; the Dominican Republic denationalized Dominicans of Haitian descent, rendering generations stateless, and Myanmar’s 1982 citizenship law excluded the Rohingya from legal status, a denial that preceded atrocities the United States has formally recognized as genocide. In each case, citizenship became an instrument for assigning unequal membership from birth.

The Justice Initiative has long documented how attacks on birthright citizenship create a tiered system in which belonging is restricted by ancestry, race, national origin, and other protected characteristics, and has defended the right to a nationality in courts and communities across Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.