birthright citizenship

Birthright citizenship is the principle that a person born within a country’s territory acquires its citizenship at birth. In the United States it derives from the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens, and from the Supreme Court’s 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which applied it to the U.S.-born children of noncitizen parents. In 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order seeking to deny citizenship to certain children born in the United States, an order widely regarded as unconstitutional; the challenge to it produced the Supreme Court’s ruling on the scope of nationwide injunctions in Trump v. CASA, Inc.