Key keywords: Supreme Court of the United States, birthright citizenship, Donald Trump, 14th Amendment, U.S. immigration policy, federal judicial ruling, presidential executive power, citizenship eligibility, Wong Kim Ark precedent, undocumented immigrants The U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision on Monday, declining to hear an appeal brought by former President Donald Trump that sought to dismantle birthright citizenship for children born to undocumented immigrants in the United States, a ruling that upholds more than 150 years of settled legal precedent. Trump first proposed rolling back birthright citizenship during his first term in 2018, claiming the 14th Amendment’s clause granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” did not apply to children of parents who entered the country without legal authorization. In the final weeks of his 2020 re-election campaign, Trump signed an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create a formal registry of children born to non-citizen parents on U.S. soil, laying the administrative groundwork to deny them full citizenship status. The order was immediately challenged by a coalition of civil rights groups, 10 state attorneys general, and dozens of mixed-status families, who argued it directly violated the clear text of the 14th Amendment, which was ratified in 1868 to grant formal citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people following the U.S. Civil War. In 2021, a federal district court in California ruled the executive order unconstitutional, finding that binding Supreme Court precedent dating back to the 1898 *United States v. Wong Kim Ark* decision explicitly confirmed that all people born on U.S. soil, regardless of their parents’ immigration status, qualify for automatic citizenship. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling in a unanimous decision last year, leading Trump’s legal team to file an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. The high court’s decision to reject the appeal was issued without a written explanation, a standard practice for cases the justices deem to lack sufficient legal merit. Legal analysts note that the ruling effectively cemented birthright citizenship as a non-negotiable feature of U.S. law for the foreseeable future, even as conservative lawmakers continue to push for a constitutional amendment to restrict eligibility. Immigration advocacy groups celebrated the decision on Monday, calling it a critical check on presidential overreach that protects the rights of millions of U.S.-born people with undocumented family members. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign issued a statement shortly after the ruling, criticizing the court’s decision and promising to make ending birthright citizenship a central plank of his policy agenda if he wins re-election in November.