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Civil rights groups want the high court to strike down the order.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced Friday that it will hear a case on Donald Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship.
The 14th Amendment to the Constitution has long been interpreted as granting citizenship to children born to immigrants in the U.S. However, the Trump administration is seeking to deny citizenship to those born to immigrants who are in the U.S. unlawfully or temporarily.
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The Justice Department is appealing decisions in two suits challenging the order, Reuters reports. One was brought by the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon, in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided in favor of the states. The other was brought by New Hampshire as a class action, and a judge granted class action status, allowing the order to be blocked nationwide. An earlier Supreme Court order held that nationwide injunctions could be granted only in certain circumstances, including class actions.
In the latter case, plaintiffs are represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund. These groups released a statement on the matter.
“No president can change the 14th Amendment’s fundamental promise of citizenship,” said Cecillia Wang, ACLU national legal director. “For over 150 years, it has been the law and our national tradition that everyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen from birth. The federal courts have unanimously held that President Trump’s executive order is contrary to the Constitution, a Supreme Court decision from 1898, and a law enacted by Congress. We look forward to putting this issue to rest once and for all in the Supreme Court this term.”
“It’s deeply troubling that we must waste precious judicial resources relitigating what has been settled constitutional law for over a century,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of Asian Law Caucus. “Every federal judge who has considered this executive order has found it unconstitutional. If implemented, this policy would force all parents — including U.S. citizens — to prove their immigration status just to get a birth certificate or Social Security number for their baby, inevitably leading to racial profiling based on names, appearance, or accent.”
Related: LGBTQ+ non-U.S. citizens at risk under Trump’s immigration crackdown: study
CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said in a CNN report that Trump's order is clearly wrong, and he expects the high court to strike it down. "There is perhaps no single issue, from the beginning of this administration, on which President Trump has been more wrong than his attempt to narrow birthright citizenship by executive order,” he said.
“Whether because it violates the relevant statutes; the Fourteenth Amendment itself; or the Supreme Court’s authoritative 1898 interpretation of that constitutional provision, the bottom line is the same,” he added. “And although the Court sided with Trump earlier this summer when he asked it to narrow injunctions against the policy, now that it’s back on the merits, there’s every reason to believe that even this Court will rule against him; the real question is likely to be on which of the multiple possible grounds.”
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