The U.S. Supreme Court decided on Dec. 5 to review whether President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship is constitutional.

The court’s decision took the form of an unsigned order without comment. No justices dissented. The case is known as Trump v. Barbara.

Trump’s Executive Order 14160 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 order, 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 petition in the case was filed with the Supreme Court on Sept. 26.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups brought the lawsuit on behalf of young children who might be subject to the executive order.

On July 10, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire granted a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the executive order. The court also provisionally certified the plaintiffs in the lawsuit as members of a class.

A class-action lawsuit is filed when a group of people or businesses suffer common injuries as a result of a party’s alleged conduct. At least one individual or entity acts as a representative of the group. For the lawsuit to proceed, a court first needs to decide if the various allegedly injured parties have enough in common to be certified as a class.

The lead respondent, identified simply as Barbara, is a citizen of Honduras who lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three young children. She has lived in the United States since 2024 and has an asylum application pending. Her husband, who is the father of her children, is not a U.S. citizen or a lawful permanent resident. Barbara expects to apply on her family’s behalf for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and other benefits that citizens are eligible for, the district court said, according to the petition.

The district court granted provisional class certification to the individuals to whom the executive order denies citizenship, but not their parents, the petition said.

The federal government appealed the ruling to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Sept. 5. The circuit court had not yet ruled on the case when the government filed its petition with the Supreme Court on Sept. 26.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the petition that the high court should take up the case to correct “the mistaken view that birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law.”

Sauer said Trump issued the executive order “to restore the [citizenship clause’s] original meaning” when it was formally adopted in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. The clause was adopted “to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their children—not to those of temporary visitors or illegal aliens,” he said.

Sauer said automatic citizenship “operates as a powerful incentive for illegal migration,” presents national security concerns, and “has spawned an industry of modern ‘birth tourism,’ by which foreigners travel to the United States solely for the purpose of giving birth here and obtaining citizenship for their children.”

The federal government also previously filed a separate petition that was virtually identical to the petition in Trump v. Barbara.

In Trump v. Washington, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled on 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 on 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.”

That court said the executive order would compel the states to disqualify many people it considers citizens and, in the process, cause them to 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.

The Supreme Court has not yet announced a ruling on the federal government’s petition in the case.

No oral argument in Trump v. Barbara has yet been scheduled.