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The fate of Donald Trump’s effort to curtail automatic citizenship for people born in the US will be decided by the Supreme Court, setting up a blockbuster ruling on a fundamental plank of the president’s anti-immigration agenda.
The country’s top court on Friday said it would rule on an appeal filed by the Trump administration against a lower court’s decision to block national enforcement of the president’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
The policy has ignited heated debate in America for challenging a right enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalised in the United States”.
The Supreme Court is set to hand down a decision this term, which ends in June. The justices are also set to rule on Trump’s authority to fire Federal Reserve officials, as well as his right to use emergency powers to impose tariffs.
The birthright case will be the second time the issue comes before the Supreme Court this year. Trump claimed victory in June when it blocked lower courts from halting his order nationwide, but that case did not squarely address the merits of the president’s move.
Just hours after that ruling from the Supreme Court, groups representing all children born in the US filed a class-action lawsuit. This led to a district judge in New Hampshire blocking Trump’s birthright order. The Trump administration sought an extraordinary review of that decision.
The president has argued that the Fourteenth Amendment does not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born” in the country. His executive order seeks to bar American citizenship from children born to unauthorised immigrants.
The citizenship clause in the Fourteenth Amendment “was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens”, the government argued in its appeal to the top court.
Lawyers representing the class of individuals affected by the order argued it was unconstitutional. The government had adopted a “blunderbuss approach” and its arguments “cannot be squared with the Citizenship Clause”, they argued to the Supreme Court.
“It’s deeply troubling that we must waste precious judicial resources relitigating what has been settled constitutional law for over a century,” Aarti Kohli, executive director of Asian Law Caucus, one of the groups representing the nationwide class, said in a statement after the court’s decision on Friday.
The top court in 1898 upheld birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment with few exceptions.
A lower court that earlier this year imposed an injunction against Trump’s order said it was “blatantly unconstitutional”.
The White House said in a statement on Friday that the Supreme Court “has the opportunity to review” the Fourteenth Amendment “and restore the meaning of citizenship in the United States to its original public meaning”.
“This case will have enormous consequences for the security of all Americans, and the sanctity of American citizenship.”
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