Supreme Court shoots down Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship, a blow to immigration agenda

President Donald Trump.

The Supreme Court dealt President Donald Trump's immigration agenda a major setback by striking down his executive order that limited birthright citizenship with a 6-3 ruling on Tuesday.

The ruling comes a week after the nation's top court delivered rulings that gave two legal victories to Trump's immigration agenda, which was a bedrock of not just his 2020 campaign but of his political platform going all the way back to when he announced his candidacy in 2015. Trump signed an executive order ending universal birthright citizenship on the first day of his second term. 

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts argued, “If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design." He added, “Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order — ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter.” 

Samuel Alito, writing for the minority opinion, blasted the high court's decision, calling the ruling "one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court” and “a serious mistake," according to the SCOTUS Blog. Alito added that "careful analysis of the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and the process that led to its adoption ... shows that it does not degrade the concept of United States citizenship in this way." He argued that "the Fourteenth Amendment confers citizenship on only those children who, at birth, owe allegiance solely to this country.”

The executive order had been challenged by multiple lawsuits, including a class-action lawsuit brought by the ACLU, Fox News reported. Trump has made immigration reform and enforcement a cornerstone of his two terms in office, reflecting how his voters view it as a top priority.

Last month, Trump posted on Truth Social saying, "The United States of America is the only Country in the World that does this, for what reason, nobody knows — But the drug cartels love it! We are, for the sake of being politically correct, a STUPID Country but, in actuality, this is the exact opposite of being politically correct, and it is yet another point that leads to the dysfunction of America."

Read the Supreme Court's full ruling on birthright citizenship here. And for more on the story, watch the video below.