Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned on Wednesday whether a ruling in favor of the Trump administration’s executive order on birthright citizenship would retroactively strip citizenship from people born on U.S. soil to illegal immigrant or tourist parents.
The justices heard arguments in Trump v. Barbara, a challenge to Trump’s 2025 executive order that sought to reestablish birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment as applying only to children born to at least one U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident parent on U.S. soil. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has argued the executive order is forward-looking, meaning it would only apply to people born 30 days after the order takes effect, but Sotomayor pressed him on that assertion.
“When we ruled in [United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind] that Indians could not become citizens, the government then after began to unnaturalize many Indians who had been sworn in as citizens,” Sotomayor said. “You asked us to concentrate only on the prospective nature of the citizens order, but the logic of your position, if accepted, is that the next president — this president or the next president or a Congress or someone else could decide that it shouldn’t be prospective.”
“There would be nothing limiting that, according to your theory,” she added.
Sauer insisted that the order would apply only to future births, but Sotomayor again asked whether his theory of birthright citizenship would open the door to people being retroactively stripped of citizenship.
“I’m asking whether the logic of your theory would permit what happened after the court’s decision in Thind, that the government could move to unnaturalize people who were born here of illegal residents,” Sotomayor asked, to which Sauer responded, “No.”
Trump was in attendance for Wednesday’s arguments, the first recorded instance of a sitting president attending oral arguments at the Supreme Court. The president previously teased going to last November’s oral arguments in his tariffs case, but ultimately did not attend.
As they were during the tariffs arguments last year, the justices appeared deeply skeptical of the Trump administration’s stance in the birthright citizenship case, seemingly unconvinced of Sauer’s arguments that their own precedents left room for reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment.
AUDIENCE OF ONE: TRUMP WATCHES FROM SUPREME COURT GALLERY DURING BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP ARGUMENTS
Since returning to the White House, Trump has had a mixed record at the Supreme Court on the merits docket, winning in last year’s case against universal injunctions but losing earlier this year in the case over his sweeping global tariffs. The administration is still waiting on a ruling over Trump’s ability to fire independent agency heads in the executive branch, and will have arguments later this month in a case over the administration’s bids to end temporary protected status for people from Haiti and Syria.
The Supreme Court is expected to issue a ruling in the birthright citizenship case by the end of June, when the court’s current term ends.