WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court has extended the date of review on President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at ending birthright citizenship to Dec. 5, 2025, according to reporting from SCOTUSblog.
The SCOTUSblog article stated the Court relisted the case — rescheduling it for further review — which is common when justices want to take a closer look at the case or determine whether a review is appropriate. According to the publication, relists usually mean “a justice is writing an opinion about the court’s decision to deny review, or the court could be summarily reversing.”
SCOTUSblog noted that since 2014, the Court has usually granted a review after relisting a case at least once, using the time to make sure the case is ready for review. If that trend holds, “the cases would likely then be set for oral arguments in early 2026, with a decision to follow by late June or early July,” wrote SCOTUSblog.
According to the article, if allowed to take effect, Trump’s executive order would deny automatic citizenship to individuals born in the United States “if their parents are in this country either illegally or temporarily.” The publication highlights that multiple federal lawsuits have “temporarily barred the Trump administration from enforcing the order while litigation moved forward.”
SCOTUSblog also emphasized that the Trump administration first asked the Supreme Court to rule not on the legality of the order, but on whether district courts had the ability to issue nationwide injunctions. In June, the Supreme Court ruled district courts were not allowed to issue such orders, and SCOTUSblog reported that after the ruling, “challenges to Trump’s order continued in the lower courts — and lower courts once again ruled for the challengers.”
The article stated that in September, the administration again asked the justices for a review, this time in two cases: Barbara v. Trump and Trump v. Washington. SCOTUSblog reported that in Barbara v. Trump, a New Hampshire judge issued a preliminary injunction blocking the order “against a class of babies born on or after Feb. 20, 2025, who are or would be denied U.S. citizenship by Trump’s order.”
In the second case, Trump v. Washington, SCOTUSblog explained how the U.S. Court of Appeals found the executive order invalid “because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
According to SCOTUSblog, the Trump administration argued that the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause was originally “adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens.”
The article noted the administration argued that courts cannot rely on the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, because the parents in that case were permanently living in the U.S. despite not being citizens.
SCOTUSblog concluded by writing that challengers of the order have urged the Court to deny review, insisting that judges have already decided “what the citizenship clause means” in the Wong Kim Ark ruling. According to the article, challengers also emphasized that Congress enacted laws in 1940 and 1952 that “essentially codified the citizenship clause, and it did so with Wong Kim Ark in mind, so that Trump’s executive order also violates federal law.”
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