The Supreme Court announced Friday it will decide the legality of President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for children born to migrant parents without legal status in the United States.
The case could have a seismic impact on the nature of citizenship in the United States, ending the automatic presumption that children born within the country are U.S. citizens regardless of the immigration status of their parents, based on more than 125 years of legal precedent.
The executive order from Trump, signed on the first day of his second term as part of a tough-on-immigration approach, sought to deny citizenship to children born in the United States if their parents were not current citizens or permanent residents. States and others challenging the executive order have said in court filings that it could strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of children each year.
The Trump administration appealed a lower court decision that found the executive order violates the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court agreed to hear the case Friday in a one-page order and could decide the case by the conclusion of the term at the end of June.
The language in the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized” in the United States are citizens, has served as the basis for that guarantee to all people born in the country.
The court had decided one aspect of the birthright citizenship case last term, focusing on trial judges who had issued rulings on a nationwide basis prohibiting Trump from enforcing the order. The high court ultimately decided nationwide injunctions as a general matter are unlawful. But that decision was about the authority of trial judges and didn’t address the underlying merits of limiting birthright citizenship.
Defenders of Trump’s move have pointed to conditional language in the amendment stating individuals born in the United States must be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to be eligible for citizenship. That interpretation cuts against more than a century of legal precedent that established that the carve-out applies to very limited categories of people, such as the children of foreign diplomats.
The Justice Department filed the petition seeking review before the court last month in two challenges, one in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled against Trump and another pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit, which has yet to render a decision.
The Trump administration petition states “the mistaken view that birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law became pervasive, with destructive consequences,” and that Trump issued the order to “restore the Clause’s original meaning.”
Early review is necessary before the 1st Circuit has rendered its decision, the Justice Department contended, because Trump’s directive “forms an integral part of the Administration’s broader effort to prevent illegal immigration.”
“Though these cases arise in a preliminary-injunction posture, further proceedings in the lower courts would have limited utility, given that the cases involve pure questions of law,” the petition states.
Civil rights groups that had brought litigation against Trump’s directive argued in a brief before the Supreme Court that review was unwarranted because the key question was already resolved, citing the decision in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark case.
“Wong Kim Ark is one of the most important decisions in our nation’s history, and it stands as a cornerstone of our modern society,” the brief states. “Reopening questions of birthright citizenship would cause potentially catastrophic effects, rippling out far past the particular Order at issue here.”
The post Supreme Court will review Trump’s birthright citizenship order appeared first on Roll Call.
