This is an adapted excerpt from the June 30 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The Supreme Court waited until the last day of its term to drop its decision in the biggest case of the year: A case in which the Trump administration was seeking to obliterate the constitutional order the United States erected after the Civil War, when we defeated slavery and amended the Constitution to state explicitly that this country was based on the principle that all citizens are equal before the law, and that if you are born here, you are a citizen.
That vision of the country is one that President Donald Trump, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and the MAGA movement are fundamentally committed to destroying. They made that clear on Day 1, Jan. 20, 2025, when just minutes after being sworn back in as president, Trump signed pardons for all the insurrectionists who had tried to overturn a democratic election four years earlier (an election in which he had, by the way, massively lost among non-white voters) then signed an order saying some natural-born U.S citizens shouldn’t be citizens.
At the time, the president was asked about the likely court challenge his executive order would face, to which he responded, “You’ll have to find out.”
The court was one vote away from taking white-out to an amendment that was bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War.
On Tuesday, Trump found out. The Supreme Court ruled his attempts to undo birthright citizenship were unconstitutional.
It was a 5-4 decision on that question, in which all three liberal justices joined conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts. Writing for the majority, Roberts said the 14th Amendment clearly means what it says: “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.’”
“We keep that promise today,” the chief justice added.
That was always what the court should have said to the Trump administration. Its case against birthright citizenship was always an unconstitutional shot in the dark, a bad-faith reading of the 14th Amendment motivated by two things: racism and xenophobia.
“The idea that you could have a country where you just set foot on U.S. soil, and any child you have can be an American citizen, collect our welfare, sit on our juries, sit in judgment of our fellow men and women, it’s outrageous,” Miller told Fox News shortly after the court’s decision. “I don’t know what they’re going to do, but here’s what I can say: If this country one way or another doesn’t end birthright citizenship, this country doesn’t have a future. Citizenship has to be sacred and precious.”
It’s hard to explain just how unhinged and racist that position is, but let me try.
Miller’s reading of the 14th Amendment had already been repudiated by the Supreme Court more than a century ago. In the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, who was born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, the court said: If you’re born in the U.S., you’re a U.S. citizen. Two years later, that same court upheld racial segregation in Plessy vs. Ferguson. Those justices enshrined Jim Crow in the laws of the U.S.; they cemented “separate but equal,” but even they upheld birthright citizenship in a 6-to-2 vote, because the language of the 14th Amendment was as plain as day.
That is how racist Miller and Trump’s argument is. It’s more racist than a racist, reactionary court was almost 130 years ago.
And there hasn’t been any real legal shift away from birthright citizenship since then. But there were a few anti-immigrant cranks turning out diatribes against “anchor babies.”
Naturally, Trump courted them, and last year he found himself back in office with this 6-3 Supreme Court majority. So he went to work pressuring the justices to reimagine the Constitution. He even personally went to oral arguments to glower at them — a first for a sitting president.
It didn’t quite work. The court still did the right thing — but just barely, with a shockingly narrow margin. In 1898, the margin was 4 votes. In 2026, this court rejected what would have amounted to essentially rewriting the Constitution on the fly by just one vote.
The court was one vote away from erasing an amendment that was bought with the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans in the Civil War. It’s jarring to think the very right to have rights in America hinged this week on Roberts and Coney Barrett.
The lesson here is that while, yes, thankfully, Trump lost, the fight isn’t over. This court has to be dealt with, and this movement has to be defeated. Because the goal is nothing less than to uproot the very foundational principles that make this country worth fighting for.
Allison Detzel contributed.
The post Trump’s birthright citizenship loss is good, but the fight is far from over appeared first on MS NOW.
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