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Here's a big one — especially if you were born in the U.S. to parents who weren't citizens or permanent residents.

On June 30, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump's executive order that tried to end birthright citizenship — the long-standing rule that anyone born on American soil is automatically a U.S. citizen. The court's 6-to-3 decision struck down the president's 2025 executive order, which sought to strip citizenship from American children born to undocumented parents.

So what was Trump actually trying to do? Trump issued an executive order in January 2025 titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," which sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who were in the country illegally or on temporary visas. In plain English: if your mom was undocumented or here on a work or student visa, and your dad wasn't a citizen or green card holder, your American birth certificate wouldn't make you a citizen under Trump's order.

Trump's order threatened to upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of families and create a permanent subclass of people born in this country but denied their rights as Americans. Think about what that means practically — kids who grew up here, went to school here, and thought they were Americans could have faced a legal limbo with no clear path forward.

The courts had been blocking the order since the start. Federal courts repeatedly blocked the administration from implementing the executive order, finding it violates the Constitution, over a century of Supreme Court precedent, and a longstanding federal statute. But the legal back-and-forth was messy. On June 27, 2025, in Trump v. CASA, Inc., the Supreme Court issued a ruling in favor of the administration that raised the possibility that hundreds of thousands of U.S.-born babies could be left vulnerable to arrest, deportation, discrimination, and denial of critical early-life nutrition and health care. That gap prompted the ACLU and partners to file a fresh nationwide class-action lawsuit.

The ACLU, the Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, Democracy Defenders Fund, and ACLU affiliates in New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts filed a nationwide class action lawsuit, Barbara v. Donald J. Trump, immediately after the CASA ruling. Trump v. Barbara was argued in the Supreme Court on April 1, 2026, by ACLU National Legal Director Cecillia Wang on behalf of the plaintiffs, and John Sauer, the U.S. Solicitor General, on behalf of the administration.

The final ruling was decisive. In a sharp rebuke to President Trump, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution guarantees automatic birthright citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the court's 6-3 opinion. The decision reaffirms that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution and rejects President Trump's attempt to redefine who is an American citizen through executive action.

Notably, it wasn't just the liberal justices who sided against the order. It was especially gratifying, said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero, that the majority opinion was authored by Chief Justice Roberts, and that Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett agreed with the decision to strike down the order.

But don't call it a clean win just yet. Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested in his opinion that Congress could hold statutory power under the Constitution to limit birthright citizenship, despite his ultimate decision to rule that the president's executive order was illegal. That means a future Congress could potentially try to chip away at this through legislation — and House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters after the decision that Congress will deal with the idea of birthright citizenship.

The bottom line: if you were born in the U.S., your citizenship is safe — for now. The court drew a clear line that no president can rewrite that rule with a pen stroke. But the political fight almost certainly isn't over.