- The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship in the United States Tuesday, rejecting President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
- In the court’s decision, Chief Justice Roberts wrote there is “scant evidence” for the Trump administration’s “dramatically revisionist view” of the 14th Amendment and limits on citizenship at birth.
- “In any case, postenactment history cannot override the text,” Roberts wrote. “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design.”
- The words used throughout Trump’s order — “mother,” “father,” “lawful,” “temporary” — are absent from the 14th Amendment, Roberts notes.
- “For a simple reason: they did not matter,” he wrote.
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