On Tuesday, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump's executive order targeting birthright citizenship. Though the real fireworks emerged from the written clash between the court's two Black justices over what the 14th Amendment was actually meant to do.

In a 6-3 ruling, the court rejected Trump's attempt to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents without legal status. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment but dissented in part, while Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch each wrote separate dissents, per the New York Times.

However, the sharpest disagreement was between Jackson and Thomas. Thomas, in a 90-page dissent joined by Gorsuch, argued the amendment was focused narrowly on “equal rights for the freed blacks” after the Civil War, and that courts later stretched it to cover children of immigrants. He argued that citizenship requires not just birth in the U.S. but "domicile," meaning both a physical home and permanent allegiance to the country. 

Jackson pushed back hard in her concurrence, joined in part by Sotomayor. She accused Thomas of applying a "narrow vision" of the amendment and, according to multiple outlets, compared his reasoning to the logic behind the Dred Scott decision, which denied citizenship to Black Americans before the Civil War. Jackson wrote that the amendment's "universalist" intent should be the final word against arguments that make "bloodline the marker of birthright."

“Justice Thomas’s telling elides the entire point of the Second Founding: The Reconstruction Amendments were an anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation, not a mere spot treatment for the dark stain of slavery,” Jackson wrote.

Trump has since called on Congress to act on birthright citizenship, though most legal analysts consider that path unlikely given the ruling's constitutional grounding.

While the ruling does not settle every legal fight over Trump’s policy, it keeps birthright citizenship intact for now. The battle will likely continue in lower courts, where states and plaintiffs are still pressing constitutional challenges.