One Supreme Court Justice's 'shame' won't stop Trump from being handed big loss: analyst

The Supreme Court is allegedly certain that Donald Trump will lose his case for withdrawing birthright citizenship.

In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order stripping certain babies born in the United States of citizenship rights. The order targeted specific categories of births, particularly those involving parents without legal immigration status. The executive order faced immediate legal challenges. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of Trump's birthright citizenship order in March 2026.

The Supreme Court issued a 6-3 decision in June 2025 that essentially allowed Trump's birthright citizenship order to proceed, though with limitations. The court limited lower courts' ability to issue nationwide injunctions against the policy, restricting legal challenges to individual cases rather than broad challenges to the entire order.

Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Supreme Court analyst for the New York Times, believes that Trump will face stiff opposition from the Justices, despite one trying to back the president's birthright citizenship ruling.

"The justices have failed to explain themselves in granting earlier stays and in denying this one," she wrote. "So we are left to guess at their reasoning and to wonder at the apparent unanimity of the latest order, which was issued without noted dissent.

"There has been educated speculation. Mark Joseph Stern, an astute Supreme Court observer for Slate, suggested that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had shamed her colleagues into denying the stay with her withering dissent back in October, when the court stayed a decision invalidating the stripping of protected status from Venezuelans.

"Justice Jackson declared then that 'I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance.' Those were strong words, but I don’t think that Justice Samuel Alito, for one, is capable of shame.

"I see a different reason for the court’s departure from its usual practice: The justices know the Trump administration is going to lose. With that knowledge, granting a stay to enable the deportation of some 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians, who would regain their protected status within months, became unthinkable."