By: Alfredo García Almeida, Journalist, international analyst, and contributor from Mérida, Yucatán.

Last Friday, the Supreme Court granted another victory to President Donald Trump in a case concerning the right to birthright citizenship. A majority of the nine justices limited their own power to oppose the president's agenda.

The high court, whose members are ideologically divided — six conservatives on one side and three liberals on the other — decided to limit the power of federal judges, of which there are some 700 spread throughout the United States. As a result, the current administration was paved the way once again, despite critics denouncing it for moving towards authoritarianism.

For over a century, the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, has been clear: "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 amendment was passed to end the Supreme Court's previous interpretation that permanently excluded the descendants of enslaved persons from eligibility for U.S. citizenship solely on the basis of race.

In the landmark 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which involved an Asian immigrant, the Supreme Court broadly interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to guarantee automatic citizenship to virtually all children born in the United States. Since then, children born in the U.S. to immigrants have acquired citizenship regardless of their parents' legal status.

Amy Coney Barrett, one of three justices appointed by Trump during his first term, signed the majority legal opinion. The ruling also authorizes the partial implementation of a decree seeking to end birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the Constitution, in certain parts of the country. Trump reacted to the ruling just under an hour after learning of it. "BIG VICTORY at the U.S. Supreme Court!" he wrote on Truth Social (capitalization his own). "Even the birthright citizenship fraud has been hit hard indirectly. It was intended for slave babies and has nothing to do with the scam of our immigration process," Trump wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting legal opinion, calling the conservative justices' decision "a travesty of the rule of law." "This," Sotomayor writes, "will only endure if those brave enough in every branch of justice fight for its survival. Today, the Supreme Court is abdicating its vital role in that effort." To illustrate the division and nuance within the high court, the document includes four additional opinions: the concurring opinions of conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Brett Kavanaugh; and the dissenting opinion of progressive Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.