US President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he intends to ask the Supreme Court to rehear a case in which it recently struck down his executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship, describing the court's ruling as "absolutely insane" and warning it would "destroy America."
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 last month that Trump's executive order — signed on his first day back in office on 20 January 2025 — violated the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which grants citizenship to all persons born on American soil who are "subject to the jurisdiction thereof." Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, affirmed that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants or parents on temporary visas are citizens at birth. The ruling was a significant setback to Trump's broader drive to overhaul nearly all forms of US immigration policy. Rights groups celebrated the decision, with American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Cecillia Wang calling it a reaffirmation of "a fundamental American promise — if you are born here, you are a citizen."
In announcing his intention to seek a rehearing, Trump also pointed to what he called alarming new evidence: billboards in Mexico advertising birthing services at a hospital in Mission, Texas — a small city five miles from the border with Reynosa, Mexico — starting at around $4,000. The claim appeared to exaggerate a Fox News report confirming just two Spanish-language billboards placed by Mission Regional Medical Center, a public nonprofit hospital. The advertisements made no mention of US citizenship. Following a backlash from Trump supporters, the hospital removed the billboards and associated social media posts, saying the marketing materials were taken down "due to any unintended misunderstanding." The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, separately ordered an investigation into the hospital, accusing it of promoting "birth tourism."
Legal experts and observers consider Trump's chances of a successful rehearing request to be extremely low. The Supreme Court rarely grants such petitions, and it has not agreed to rehear a case after issuing a ruling in decades. Petitions of this type must also typically be filed within 25 days of a ruling. Trump additionally called on Republican lawmakers in Congress to pass legislation restricting birthright citizenship — a politically difficult path, given consistently strong public support for the practice and the court's majority opinion suggesting a constitutional amendment would be required to change it.
The stakes of the policy are substantial. A study by the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State University estimated that around 255,000 infants per year would have been born in the United States without citizenship under Trump's original order, potentially expanding the undocumented population by 2.7 million by 2045 and, the researchers warned, creating "a self-perpetuating, multigenerational underclass" of US-born residents denied the rights their birthplace would otherwise confer.