The president asserted that lawmakers could “easily” address the issue through legislation, defying years of legislative stalemates over immigration.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday called on Congress to end birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court upheld the constitutional right and struck down his executive order seeking to redefine who is American.
“Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform, calling the court’s ruling “too bad” for the nation. “They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
The president further asserted that lawmakers could “easily” address the issue through legislation — a claim that runs counter to decades of precedent, given Congress’s enduring gridlock on immigration, and some legal experts’ comments that a constitutional amendment would be necessary.
The White House declined to elaborate on Trump’s next steps, referring questions to the president’s post.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) was talking to reporters when the decision was issued. He took a deep breath before saying he was disappointed by the decision. Birthright citizenship, he said, “is one of those things that was intended to serve a noble, important purpose, and has been thwarted and overused and abused.”
“I’m sure the conclusion from this opinion is going to be that you got to have a — you got to amend the Constitution to fix that,” he said. “I will say I’m very disappointed in that outcome. I think it subjects the country to serious challenges going forward, and we’ll deal with it as a conference.”
Senate Republicans also expressed frustration with the decision. “The long fight for a constitutional amendment begins now,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote on X.
But it is unclear how Republicans can assemble a majority to advance legislation on an issue that has proved politically complicated. An AP-NORC poll conducted in April found that about two-thirds of U.S. adults said that automatic citizenship should be granted to all children born in the country, no matter the circumstances. The poll also found that the public was evenly split on whether children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country illegally should receive automatic citizenship.
Meanwhile, lawmakers are already wrestling over legislation to address national security, food and agriculture issues, and federal spending needs before this fall’s midterm elections. Trump also has insisted that Congress must pass legislation to impose new voting restrictions, further complicating the GOP’s agenda.
Democratic leaders have criticized many of Trump’s efforts to reduce immigration and had vowed to oppose his efforts to end birthright citizenship.
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“Despite Trump’s best efforts to bully them, the Supreme Court just reaffirmed that if you are born in America, you belong in America,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said in a statement on Tuesday.
Trump had seemed resigned to defeat, predicting in May that the court would “probably rule against me because they seem to like doing that” — a frequent criticism despite the court’s conservative tilt and that three of its nine members are his appointees.
But Trump on Tuesday also highlighted the justices’ other rulings, such as the administration’s victory in Trump v. Slaughter. The court on Monday ruled 6-3 that a president could more easily dismiss leaders of roughly two dozen independent regulatory agencies, expanding Trump’s power over the federal bureaucracy. The president also touted the court’s rulings on transgender athletes and campaign finance rules, calling both decisions a “BIG WIN” as the justices sided with the administration and Republicans.
“We had other good Victories, too, and we also had the Birthright Citizenship loss, which we will work to correct in Congress, but the big SLAUGHTER, was SLAUGHTER,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The Republican Party was treated very fairly by the United States Supreme Court.”
The justices’ 5-4 ruling upheld the long-settled understanding that the 14th Amendment automatically confers citizenship on any child born in the United States, with limited exceptions for children of diplomats and other rare cases. The justices struck down an executive order that the president issued in January 2025 — within hours of being sworn into office for his second term — that said citizenship would not be granted to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or those on temporary visas for work, travel, school or humanitarian reasons.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every freeborn person in this land,’” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a George W. Bush appointee, wrote in the majority opinion. “We keep that promise today.”
Justice Samuel Alito, a fellow George W. Bush appointee, dissented from the ruling.
“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” Alito wrote, arguing that the ruling would contribute to illegal immigration to the United States.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) also said that he found the ruling “disappointing,” arguing that birthright citizenship is widely abused.
“You’re seeing … people coming in from other countries just to give birth, so that they can have citizenship, or for the reasons of living off of the welfare state, not to seek the American Dream,” Scalise said. “The reason that people wait in other countries for years, in some cases, to come here should be to seek the American Dream, to be a part of the greatness of this nation.”
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Justin Jouvenal contributed to this report.
