Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Plan To End Birthright Citizenship

The Supreme Court is blocking President Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship, saying it violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment.Trump v. Barbara centered on an executive order Mr. Trump signed on his first day of his second term in the White House. The order denied citizenship to children born in America if their parents were in the country illegally or on short-term visas. A federal judge put the order on hold, and it has never been implemented.Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurring opinion joining part of the majority opinion and dissenting in part. Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissent with Justice Neil Gorsuch joining. Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Gorsuch also filed individual dissenting opinions.The 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause provides that a person becomes a citizen “of the United States and the state wherein they reside” if they are born in the United States and are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”The 14th Amendment was passed in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857, which held that no person enslaved in America could be considered an American citizen. A later Supreme Court decision expanded birthright citizenship to anyone born in the country. One of Mr. Trump’s first orders upon returning to the White House declared that children born in America would not be automatically entitled to citizenship if their parents were in this country illegally or temporarily. The Trump administration argued that illegal aliens are not enmeshed in the social contract and so their children don’t qualify for citizenship as defined by the 14th Amendment. The Supreme Court rejected that interpretation. “The Citizenship Clause uses jurisdiction in its ordinary sense — referring to the power of the United States to govern those within its territory,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. He went on to state that children born to parents unlawfully or temporarily present in America “satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are ‘born … in the United States’ and ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”“Words appearing frequently in the Executive Order — ‘mother,’ ‘father,’ ‘lawful,’ ‘temporary’ — are absent from the Clause. For a simple reason: they did not matter,” Chief Justice Roberts added.In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh agreed that the executive order clearly violated federal law but dissented with the majority that it violated the 14th Amendment. He suggested that if Congress passes a statute creating new exceptions to citizenship — along the lines of Mr. Trump’s executive order — it “would pass constitutional muster.”Justice Thomas, in a lengthy dissent, said the court took an “extraordinary step” in holding that the president’s executive order was unconstitutional. “The Court adds to the sad history of the Fourteenth Amendment, which was designed and understood to secure equal rights for the freed blacks but has instead been repurposed for political projects that the Reconstruction Congress did not support.”Justice Thomas added that “many potential applications of the President’s Order are consistent with the original public meaning of the Citizenship Clause.”“This is one of the most important decisions in the history of the Court, and in my judgment, the Court has made a serious mistake,” Justice Alito wrote in his own lengthy dissent. He stated that the 14th Amendment dictates who must be a citizen, but not who may be a citizen.“The original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require inhumane results, and we should not adopt an erroneous interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment simply out of fear of the consequences of ‘rocking the boat’ or as a reaction to current immigration policy,” Justice Alito added.In a short dissent, Justice Gorsuch wrote that Mr. Trump’s executive order has some lawful applications but that doesn’t mean that it is lawful across the board and immune from narrower legal challenges. He cited the government’s insistence that a portion of the order blocking citizenship to children born to parents who make their permanent home in the country despite being in the country illegally can survive any possible legal challenge. “About that, however, I harbor doubts,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.The government was due to spend 30 days devising a new policy scheme to ensure the children of illegal aliens are not granted citizenship, but three lower court injunctions stopped it from even beginning the policymaking process. After three appeals courts refused to intervene because the cases are working their way through the lower courts, the administration filed an emergency order with the Supreme Court.President Trump has not publicly reacted to the decision yet but previously said he expected a loss in the case. “They’ll probably rule against us,” Mr. Trump said of the justices in an interview after oral arguments.A labor organizing group, Organized Power in Numbers, welcomed the court decision. “The Trump administration tried to narrow the definition of citizenship and the access to the rights that come with it and even this Supreme Court disagreed. This is a real relief, and it is welcome. It is also the bare minimum,” the group said in a statement.

Supreme Court Blocks Trump’s Plan To End Birthright Citizenship

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