The Supreme Court of the United States has struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order eliminating birthright citizenship, upholding the 14th Amendment instead.
Tuesday marked the last day of the Supreme Court’s term and the decision was the last one issued.
The case, Trump v. Barbara, focused on Trump’s order that children born in the U.S. to parents in the country, either temporarily or illegally, are not American citizens, The Washington Post reported.
The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that citizenship dates back to English common law and being “born within the dominions.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Roberts wrote, according to The Associated Press. “We keep that promise today.”
Liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Roberts, along with conservative Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, on the majority opinion.
But Kavanaugh’s dissent threaded a needle, saying that he was “concurring in the judgment,” but also “dissenting in part.” That means, according to CNN, he agrees that the majority of the executive order was unconstitutional, but he disagrees that the statutes are required by the Constitution.
So as CNN noted, the ruling was 6-3, but the court was split 5-4 on whether Congress could vote to do away with birthright citizenship.