President Donald Trump vowed on social media to immediately petition the U.S. Supreme Court for a rehearing after justices blocked his executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, setting up an exceedingly rare legal challenge following a term that reaffirmed the 14th Amendment’s protections.
When the Supreme Court concluded its term last month, President Donald Trump and his legal team immediately began pursuing a legal maneuver rarely seen in modern American jurisprudence: petitioning the nation’s highest court to reconsider its own rulings.
On June 30, the Supreme Court struck down the administration’s birthright citizenship order in a 6-3 vote, ruling that the executive action violated the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts emphasized that the foundational guarantee remains firmly intact after 150 years.
“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.”
How Trump's new birthright citizenship orders differ from what Supreme Court struck down
Chief Justice John Roberts, Supreme Court of the United States
Five justices concluded that the administration’s directive clearly violated the constitutional framework. A sixth magistrate, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, reasoned that the executive order was constitutional but still impeded by existing federal immigration legislation, as reported in coverage detailing the court’s breakdown.
Despite that clear ruling, Trump remains defiant. In a recent social media post, he declared: I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY. Later, speaking from the Oval Office alongside White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, Trump framed the policy failure bluntly: We had a bad decision, very unfair decision.
Long Odds and Historical Precedent
Legal experts agree that the president faces nearly insurmountable hurdles in asking for a rehearing. Although Supreme Court rules permit parties to file petitions within 25 days of a decision, the bench traditionally grants such requests solely when significant new facts emerge post-ruling—not simply because a losing party rejects the outcome.
Historical data underscores that assessment: the last time the Supreme Court agreed to rehear a case following oral arguments was in 1965, and the last time it actually reversed a prior decision on rehearing was in 1956.
Simultaneously, the administration’s allies have advanced new policy fronts. Republican Senator Jim Banks of Indiana introduced fresh legislation aimed at redefining the parameters of citizenship, while right-wing commentators launched attacks against Justice Amy Coney Barrett—appointed by Trump in 2020—for joining the majority opinion.
The Debate Over Birth Tourism and CDC Data
To justify revisiting the constitutional guarantee, the administration and its supporters have pointed to what they characterize as widespread abuse via “birth tourism,” wherein pregnant foreign nationals travel to the United States primarily to secure automatic citizenship for their offspring. Highlighting this argument on social media, Trump asserted that signs and billboards are posted along the southern border and in Mexico advertising deliveries starting at $4,000.
However, immigration specialists and demographic data contradict the scale of that claim. David Bier, an immigration expert at the libertarian Cato Institute, noted that none of the conservative justices adopted the administration’s framing of illegal immigration as an invasion or a justification for bypassing the 14th Amendment.
