Trump Says He Will Attend Supreme Court Hearing on Birthright Citizenship — A Potential First for a Sitting President

President Donald Trump told reporters Tuesday that he plans to be in attendance when the Supreme Court hears arguments Wednesday over his executive order limiting certain federal benefits for some U.S.-born children of noncitizens.

“I’m going,” Trump said, adding more tentatively, “I think so. I do believe.” Historians say a sitting president attending oral arguments at the high court would be unprecedented.

Trump’s announcement follows a pattern: he has previously suggested attending oral arguments and then reversed course. Last October he said he would watch arguments in a case over his so-called Liberation Day tariffs but later did not attend; he ultimately lost that case, 6-3.

On the merits, Trump repeated his long-held view in the Oval Office that the 14th Amendment was intended primarily to confer citizenship on the children of former slaves and not broadly to everyone born on U.S. soil. That interpretation is rejected by the majority of constitutional scholars and by longstanding legal precedent.

“Everything having to do with birthright citizenship, it was at the end of the Civil War,” he said. “The reason was it had to do with the babies of slaves and the protection of the babies of slaves. It didn't have to do with the protection of multi-millionaires and billionaires wanting to have their children get an American citizenship.”

On his first day back in office last year, Trump signed an executive order aiming to deny certain federal benefits — including passports — to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants and some temporary visa holders. He argued that automatic citizenship encourages illegal immigration and so-called “birth tourism.”

Federal judges blocked the order, ruling that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to almost everyone born on U.S. soil regardless of parents’ immigration status. The Supreme Court will hear the administration’s appeal and decide whether to overturn those lower-court rulings and allow the order to take effect.

Trump has repeatedly pressed the justices in public and on social media, alternating between urging them to uphold his order and criticizing rulings he dislikes. Speaking to reporters Tuesday, he criticized judges across the political spectrum, saying Republican appointees sometimes rule against the presidents who appointed them while Democratic appointees “almost without fail” vote with their backers.

The Supreme Court earlier Tuesday issued an 8-1 decision rejecting Colorado’s ban on so-called conversion therapy aimed at LGBTQ people; in that case, two liberal justices joined all of the conservative justices in the majority, illustrating that decisions do not always split along predictable partisan lines.

Trump said he had been to the Supreme Court “once before,” though as president he has visited the building multiple times — including formal investiture ceremonies for his nominees Neil Gorsuch (2017) and Brett Kavanaugh (2018), and visits following the death of retired Justice John Paul Stevens (2019) and during funeral ceremonies for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (2020). He did not attend the ceremonial investiture for Justice Amy Coney Barrett, which was postponed into the next administration because of the pandemic.

A White House spokesperson referred questions about the president’s plans back to his remarks to reporters. A Supreme Court spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment.