Trump's week in review: USPS whistleblower; birth tourism order blocked; ballroom gets green light
2. Judge blocks latest Trump effort to limit birthright citizenship
U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman released a 35-page ruling on Wednesday that blocks President Donald Trump’s most recent executive orders aimed at limiting birthright citizenship.
Last month, Trump signed two orders directed at stopping “the practice of birth tourism” and identifying “certain categories of children of aliens who are not entitled to birthright citizenship consistent with historical exceptions to birthright citizenship recognized by the Supreme Court.”
However, Boardman concluded that the orders were “almost certainly unconstitutional” and added that the “Court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the President’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them.”
In June, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump v. Barbara that an earlier executive order from Trump limiting birthright citizenship violated 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,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority.
“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.”
