Trump’s New Birthright Citizenship Curbs Halted By US Federal Court

A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing the president’s latest attempt to impose new limits on automatic birthright citizenship, following an earlier legal defeat before the US Supreme Court.

 

In an order issued on Wednesday, a US judge in Maryland ruled that President Donald Trump’s August executive order, which expands the categories of non-citizen parents whose children would be ineligible for citizenship, is likely unlawful as it applies to a nationwide class of families whose legal status was already at issue in earlier court proceedings.

 

The new exclusions would include people who have taken part in a “commercial transaction to ensure” that they give birth in the US.

 

The latest setback to Trump’s hard-line immigration agenda puts the dispute over birthright citizenship on course to return to the Supreme Court. The US Justice Department could next ask a federal appeals court to lift the district judge’s order and allow officials to implement the president’s policy while the legal challenges continue.

 

US District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote in her decision imposing a preliminary injunction that the Supreme Court had “already decided that the children in the class are citizens at birth”.

 

“This court must, once again, preliminarily enjoin enforcement of the president’s most recent attempt to strip the right to citizenship from them,” she wrote.

 

Boardman said the administration had advanced a “distorted interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down Trump’s original executive order seeking to restrict birthright citizenship.

 

She said the president’s latest action would deny citizenship to members of a class she had already certified, covering children of non-citizen parents who are either not legally in the US or are in the country on temporary visas.

 

Spokespeople for the White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

 

Shana Khader, legal director at We Are CASA, one of the groups that brought the Maryland case, said in a statement that “the White House must recognise it will not succeed in stripping children of their right to citizenship, evading binding court decisions or placing the president’s anti-immigrant agenda above the Constitution”.

 

Supreme Court Rejected Trump’s Earlier Order

 

The Supreme Court struck down Trump’s original executive order seeking to curb birthright citizenship in June, delivering a major rebuke from a conservative-majority bench that has largely sided with the administration over the past year and a half.

 

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority at the time.

 

“The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.”

 

Trump subsequently vowed to explore other ways to restrict citizenship.

 

He signed two executive orders in early August targeting what the administration calls “birth tourism” — a term used to describe non-citizens travelling to the US with the intention of obtaining citizenship for their children.

 

One of those orders, which is not central to the latest legal challenges, directs US agencies to adopt new rules or update existing policies to allow immigration authorities to deny or revoke visas, or otherwise refuse entry to foreign nationals travelling to the US “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”.

 

New Order Expands Citizenship Exclusions

 

The second executive order addresses categories of people whose children would not be eligible for citizenship.

 

In addition to the “commercial transaction” exclusion, the order calls for new exceptions covering babies born in the US to a broader category of foreign nationals who work for their governments or international organisations in the US, are members of designated terrorist groups or engage in fraud.

 

Opponents accused the administration of disregarding the Supreme Court’s ruling and again seeking to rewrite the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship to nearly everyone born on US soil.

 

They filed challenges to the new policy as part of earlier class-action lawsuits in New Hampshire and Maryland that contested Trump’s original, now-defunct citizenship restrictions.

 

The judge in New Hampshire is also considering a request to block Trump from implementing key provisions of the new executive order.

 

Justice Department Challenges Legal Standing

 

The Justice Department argued that the challengers lacked legal standing because they had not shown that the existing class actions covered families affected by the president’s latest action.

 

The government also argued that the challenges were premature because federal agencies had not yet taken steps to implement Trump’s order. It further maintained that the Supreme Court had not definitively ruled out the possibility of expanding exceptions to birthright citizenship.

 

The case is Casa Inc. v. Trump, 25-cv-201, US District Court for the District of Maryland, Greenbelt.

 

For enquiries or further information, contact ask@tlr.ae or call +971 52 644 3004. Follow The Law Reporters on WhatsApp Channels.