Supreme Court deals devastating blow to Trump in major citizenship rights case

The Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to President Donald Trump’s agenda Tuesday after ruling 5-4 against his efforts to eliminate birthright citizenship, a constitutional right long targeted by far-right figures.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community," wrote Justice John Roberts for the court's majority opinion. "We keep that promise today."

With pressure from his White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump has long sought to overturn birthright citizenship, enshrined as a constitutional right in 1868 and understood to have explicitly applied to the children “even of aliens.” Last week, Miller called for the Supreme Court to issue a unanimous ruling in favor of overturning birthright citizenship, claiming that anything less would "mean a nonfunctioning democracy," Yahoo News reported.

The Supreme Court’s decision Tuesday was forecast months prior after Trump, after attending a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship in April, stormed out of the courtroom to immediately voice his frustrations on social media.

The Supreme Court’s decision was also forecast as recently as last weekend after William Baude, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Constitutional Law Institute, predicted the court would likely rule against Trump in its decision.

Trump has repeatedly claimed, falsely, that the United States is the only country on earth to have birthright citizenship, despite similar rights being enshrined in dozens of countries, including the United States’ neighbors Canada and Mexico.