The Trump administration on Friday reportedly appealed to the Supreme Court to review the president’s executive order seeking to unilaterally terminate birthright citizenship after multiple federal courts blocked it from taking effect.
The executive order, which Trump signed his first day in office, seeks to deny citizenship to children born to immigrants on visas or in the U.S. illegally. The policy contradicts a century’s worth of legal understanding of the meaning of the 14th Amendment, which declares that “all persons born or naturalized” in the U.S. are citizens.
Friday’s appeal, obtained by CNN, claims that understanding is “mistaken” and has led to “destructive consequences.”
“The lower court’s decisions invalidated a policy of prime importance to the president and his administration in a manner that undermines our border security,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in the appeal. “Those decisions confer, without lawful justification, the privilege of American citizenship on hundreds of thousands of unqualified people.”
The appeal marks the second time the high court has been asked to consider matters related to the policy.
In June, the court’s six-person conservative majority ruled that many nationwide injunctions “exceed” the authority Congress gave to the federal courts, including in decisions that nationally paused the birthright citizenship order.
The court’s three-person liberal wing dissented to the decision, which did not rule on the merits of the birthright citizenship question itself.
“It is not difficult to predict how this all ends,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent. “Eventually, executive power will become completely uncontainable, and our beloved constitutional Republic will be no more.”
After the June ruling, lawsuits, including class actions, continued to challenge the Trump administration over birthright citizenship.
In July, a New Hampshire federal policy granted an injunction to halt the policy in one such lawsuit, and that same month the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held the underlying Trump order was unconstitutional.
“We conclude that the Executive Order is invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” the ruling stated.
If Trump’s executive order goes into effect, some 150,000 newborns could be denied citizenship each year who would’ve previously qualified.
The push to end birthright citizenship is the among the most controversial aspects of the Trump administration’s larger push to reduce immigration and tighten access to U.S. legal residency status, a campaign that has also included mass deportations and the effective shutdown of the asylum process at ports of entry.
