The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to look at whether President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order is constitutional.

A petition seeking review by the nation’s highest court was filed late on Sept. 26. The Supreme Court is currently in its summer recess. It will open a new term hearing oral arguments on Oct. 6.

Trump’s Executive Order 14160, signed on Jan. 20, states that “the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

According to the order, an individual born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” if that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth.

It also states that the privilege of U.S. citizenship does not apply to an individual whose mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and whose father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident at the time of that individual’s birth.

The executive order has prompted debate over the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause, which states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The Supreme Court previously partly allowed the executive order on June 27 in a decision that said universal injunctions likely exceed the courts’ authority.

The 6–3 decision in Trump v. CASA Inc. didn’t provide a definitive ruling on the constitutionality of the president’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship but instead focused on whether three nationwide injunctions blocking the policy could stand.

The court majority said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”

In the new petition, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to review two lower court rulings that halted the executive order.

“The lower courts’ decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the President and his Administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” Sauer said.

“Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled July 23 that the executive order was “invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

Before that, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington ruled against the executive order Feb. 6. That court granted a preliminary injunction blocking the order because it “subjects” the states challenging the order to “immediate economic and administrative harms.”

The court said the executive order would compel the states to disqualify many people it considers citizens and in the process lose federal funds they would otherwise be eligible to receive. The states are likely to succeed on their claim that the executive order violates the 14th Amendment, the court added.

Sauer said that the lower courts misinterpreted United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), a key Supreme Court decision that held that the children of lawful permanent residents were entitled to citizenship under the citizenship clause.

In fact, he said, the precedent “implies that illegal aliens are excluded from the Citizenship Clause.”

Sauer said the ruling stated that “aliens ‘are entitled to the protection of and owe allegiance to the United States, so long as they are permitted by the United States to reside here.’”

“Illegal aliens are not ‘permitted by the United States to reside here,’ and thus their children are excluded from citizenship,” he said.

It is unclear when the Supreme Court will act on the government’s new petition.

Sam Dorman contributed to this report.

This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Sept. 26, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Sept. 27, 2025.