US President, Donald Trump
An appeals court will not allow the Trump administration to end birthright citizenship for certain children of immigrants, in a ruling that could propel the issue to the Supreme Court.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Wednesday declined an emergency Justice Department request that it lift the hold a Seattle judge had placed blocking implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order, after concluding the order ran afoul of the Constitution.
The 9th Circuit panel – made up of a Trump appointee, a Jimmy Carter appointee and a George W. Bush appointee – said that a closer review of the case will move forward in its court, with arguments slated for June.
The case before the San Francisco-based appeals court is one of several major legal challenges to the policy and the first to get the weigh-in by an appellate panel.
In filings, the Justice Department said that the birthright citizenship executive order was “an integral part of President Trump’s broader effort to repair the United States’ immigration system and to address the ongoing crisis at the southern border.”
For decades, under an 1868 constitutional amendment and a statute that preceded it, citizenship has been extended to anyone born on US soil, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. Trump is seeking to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents are either undocumented or are lawfully present in the United States on temporary visas.
The 9th Circuit case arose from a lawsuit filed by the Democratic attorneys general of four states led by Washington. Their filings pushed back on the DOJ’s efforts to frame the dispute around a president’s powers in the immigration sphere.
“This is not a case about ‘immigration,” they wrote. “It is about citizenship rights that the Fourteenth Amendment and federal statute intentionally and explicitly place beyond the President’s authority to condition or deny.”
The majority of the 9th Circuit panel indicated that the Trump administration had failed at this emergency phase because it had not shown it that it was likely to succeed on the merits of the dispute.
Judge Danielle Forrest, a Trump appointee, wrote a concurrence stating that she was not expressing any views on the underlying legal arguments, and that instead she had voted against the Trump administration because it had not shown that there was an “emergency” requiring an immediate intervention of the court.
“Deciding important substantive issues on one week’s notice turns our usual decision-making process on its head,” she wrote. “We should not undertake this task unless the circumstances dictate that we must. They do not here.”
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