Supreme Court rejects Trump order to end birthright citizenship

In a ruling announced on the audio transcript, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s executive order that sought to deny automatic U.S. citizenship to children born in the country to parents who are in the United States temporarily or unlawfully, citing the 14th Amendment.

The justices pointed to the Constitution’s 14th Amendment citizenship clause — "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States" — as central to their decision, according to the report.

The Trump administration had argued that the amendment, adopted after the Civil War, was intended to grant citizenship to freed slaves and their descendants and not to the roughly 250,000 babies born each year to parents present in the U.S. unlawfully, the coverage said. The administration framed the change as addressing what it called the policy’s cost and social consequences.

President Trump attended oral arguments in April, the broadcast noted, the first sitting president to do so for this case. The transcript includes a direct quote attributed to the president: "This decision by the Supreme Court is a very big one. They'll probably rule against me because they seem to like doing that." The report also placed the U.S. rule in international context, noting that about three dozen countries grant broad birthright citizenship.

The Supreme Court’s reliance on the 14th Amendment leaves in place the long-standing constitutional interpretation that birthright citizenship applies to those born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction, while rejecting the administration’s efforts to narrow that interpretation by executive order.

Natalie Brand, CBS News, the White House.