Supreme Court rejects Trump order limiting birthright citizenship
The Supreme Court has rejected President Donald Trump's attempt to limit birthright citizenship, ruling that children of illegal immigrants born in the United States are citizens.
In a decision released Tuesday morning in the case of Trump v. Barbara, the high court ruled that a Trump executive order signed on his first day back in the White House last year, limiting birthright citizenship, is unconstitutional.
Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, joined by justices Sonia Sotomayor, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Roberts cited the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that “[a]ll 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.”
“If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design,” Roberts wrote.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ … We keep that promise today.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh authored an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, while justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch penned dissenting opinions.
In his dissent, Thomas argued that the Civil Rights Act and the Citizenship Clause, when enacted, never “guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”
“The Court today takes the extraordinary step of holding facially unconstitutional the President’s Order excluding from citizenship the children of foreign temporary visitors and illegal aliens,” Thomas wrote.
“In doing so, 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.”
Trump's executive order removes automatic citizenship for children born to illegal or temporary immigrants in the U.S.
“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” the order stated.
The executive order was the subject of multiple lawsuits, including one filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other progressive advocacy organizations.
After multiple courts issued nationwide injunctions against the order, the Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed last December to hear oral arguments.
During oral arguments in April, there was much debate over the 1898 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the high court ruled 6-2 that a person born in California was indeed a U.S. citizen, even though his parents were Chinese nationals.
D. John Sauer, solicitor general for the U.S. Department of Justice, argued in defense of the Trump executive order, claiming that the administration did not want to overturn Wong Kim Ark, as it agrees with the overall ruling. Sauer said the administration would not enforce the executive order on the children of immigrants who have already been born.
Cecillia Derphine Wang of the ACLU argued against the executive order, saying the administration made a “fatal concession” by admitting it does not want to overturn Wong Kim Ark.
“When the government tried to strip Mr. Wong Kim Ark’s citizenship on largely the same grounds they raise today, this court said no,” Wang stated. “Wong Kim Ark’s controlling rule of decision precludes their parental domicile requirement.”
Wang argued that the preexisting exemptions found in birthright citizenship — like the children of foreign diplomats or the children of hostile enemies in occupied territory — were meant to be a “closed set” and that Congress, when adopting the 14th Amendment, did not intend for the list to be expanded.
