New Jersey officials praise Supreme Court ruling protecting birthright citizenship
State leaders, civil liberties advocates, and immigration activists say the ruling reaffirms the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship by birth.
State officials, civil liberties advocates, and immigration activists praised Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding birthright citizenship, which the Trump administration had targeted as part of its sweeping anti-immigration platform.
In a 6-3 decision released Tuesday morning, the high court struck down President Donald Trump’s 2025 executive order declaring that the United States would not grant automatic citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, even if those children were born on American soil.
The ruling reaffirmed the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
Democratic officials throughout the Garden State, including Attorney General Jennifer Davenport, lauded the ruling and decried Trump’s “egregiously unconstitutional” move.
“In striking down President Trump’s flagrantly illegal birthright citizenship executive order, the court held the president has no power to rewrite our nation’s citizenship rules with the stroke of a pen,” Davenport said during a joint press conference with the attorneys general from Connecticut, California, and Massachusetts.
“We are thrilled that today’s majority recognized what we said in our cases,” she continued. “Birthright citizenship has been the law at every point in time during America’s history, except for the Civil War. And it remains our unbroken constitutional tradition today.”
Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a first-term Democrat, echoed that sentiment in her own statement.
“Birthright citizenship is a foundational constitutional guarantee that has shaped our nation for more than 150 years,” Sherrill said. “Donald Trump’s malicious attempt to tear down this guarantee was so plainly unlawful and reckless that his own hand-picked Supreme Court said no.”
In the executive order, signed shortly after Trump’s inauguration, the administration argued that undocumented immigrants and those temporarily in the country were not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” and therefore their children were not entitled to citizenship.
“The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” the executive order said.
State attorneys general from around the country quickly sued, and several lower courts blocked the order, which never took effect.
Davenport, who led a coalition of attorneys general urging the high court to preserve birthright citizenship, argued in a February filing that the order violated both the Constitution and federal law.
State officials warned that the order could deny citizenship to thousands of children born in New Jersey every year and leave some potentially stateless or at risk of deportation, according to the filing.
Those children could lose eligibility for federal programs, access to Social Security numbers, and the ability to work legally or vote as adults.
Amol Sinha, the executive director of the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, called the ruling a “victory for immigrant communities that honors our nation’s promise: If you are born in the United States, then you are an American citizen.”
“This decision is a clear rejection of the Trump administration’s attacks on birthright citizenship and reaffirms that it is the Constitution, not the president, that dictates who is a citizen,” he said.
In an afternoon post on social media, Trump wrote that the decision was “too bad for our country” and claimed Congress could “easily make it up” through legislation.
“No long and unwieldy Constitutional Amendment is necessary!” Trump incorrectly claimed. “Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!”
Any such law would almost certainly face constitutional challenges because it would conflict with the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause.
Still, Nedia Morsy, director of immigrant advocacy group Make the Road New Jersey, said the country could not “rely on today’s court to protect tomorrow’s rights.”
Morsy said the executive order was part of a broader push to strip minorities of their rights and citizenship. She said that effort has also included the administration’s immigration raids and its use of private prisons, such as Newark’s Delaney Hall and the Elizabeth Detention Center, as holding facilities.
“While immigrant families across the country can breathe a small sigh of relief with this decision, birthright citizenship was never up for question before Trump’s far-right MAGA movement captured our government,” she said. “Birthright citizenship is an explicit right named in our Constitution, and we should all be alarmed that the Supreme Court was this close to taking it away.”
Steve Janoski is a multi-award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Post, USA Today, the Associated Press, The Bergen Record and the Asbury Park Press. His reporting has exposed corruption, government malfeasance and police misconduct