Donald Trump Suffers Major Legal Blow Over Birthright Citizenship

[Thiệu Ngô]

The Trump administration suffered a major blow on Friday when an appeals court upheld an injunction that blocked the president’s executive order to end birthright citizenship.

By James Bickerton

On January 20, hours after his second inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and those in the U.S. on a temporary basis. However, a series of court rulings have prevented the order from taking effect.

With Republicans controlling both the White House and Congress, the courts have emerged as one of the main obstacles to the Trump administration’s policies, blocking efforts such as sanctions against International Criminal Court employees and stripping Haitian migrants of legal protection.

What To Know

On Friday, the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is in Boston and comprises three judges, upheld a ruling that U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin made earlier this year.

In February, in response to a case brought by 18 Democratic-led states and the District of Columbia, Sorokin blocked Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, which has widely been regarded as a constitutional right via the 14th Amendment, with only a few exemptions, since 1898’s United States v. Wong Kim Ark ruling—a case concerning the son of Chinese immigrants.

A series of lower courts have ruled that Trump’s executive order was unconstitutional as it violated the 14th Amendment.

In June, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to limit, but not end, the power of lower courts to obstruct the executive order in a procedural case, but it has not ruled on the merits of birthright citizenship itself.

Following this ruling, Sorokin affirmed his original decision, and the case then went before the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

In July, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco separately upheld an injunction blocking Trump’s executive order from being applied on the basis that it violated the 14th Amendment.

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, to issue its own ruling on the legality of the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship.

What People Are Saying

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its ruling: “The Government was therefore wrong to argue that the plaintiffs are not likely to succeed in showing that the children that the EO covers are citizens of this country at birth, just as the Government is wrong to argue that various limits on our remedial power independently require us to reverse the preliminary injunctions.”

The judges added: “Our nation’s history of efforts to restrict birthright citizenship—from Dred Scott in the decade before the Civil War to the attempted justification for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Wong Kim Ark—has not been a proud one.”