WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The legal battle over President Trump\u2019s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite his major Supreme Court victory Friday limiting nationwide injunctions.<\/p>\n
Immigrant advocates are vowing to fight to ensure birthright citizenship remains the law as the Republican president tries to do away with a more than century-old constitutional precedent. <\/p>\n
The high court\u2019s ruling sends cases challenging the president\u2019s birthright citizenship executive order back to the lower courts. But the ultimate fate of Trump\u2019s policy remains uncertain. <\/p>\n
Here\u2019s what to know about birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court\u2019s ruling and what happens next.<\/p>\n
What does birthright citizenship mean?<\/p>\n
Birthright citizenship makes anyone born in the United States an American citizen, including children born to mothers in the country illegally.<\/p>\n
The practice goes back to soon after the Civil War, when Congress ratified the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, in part to ensure that Black people, including formerly enslaved Americans, had citizenship.<\/p>\n
\u201cAll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States,\u201d the amendment states.<\/p>\n
Thirty years later, Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, was refused reentry into the U.S. after traveling overseas. His suit led to the Supreme Court explicitly ruling that the amendment gives citizenship to anyone born in the United States, no matter their parents\u2019 legal status.<\/p>\n
It has been seen since then as an intrinsic part of U.S. law, with only a few exceptions, such as for children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s longtime goal<\/p>\n
Trump signed an executive order upon assuming office in January that seeks to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are living in the U.S. illegally or temporarily. The order is part of the president\u2019s hard-line anti-immigration agenda, and he has called birthright citizenship a \u201cmagnet for illegal immigration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump and his supporters focus on one phrase in the amendment \u2014 \u201csubject to the jurisdiction thereof\u201d \u2014 which they contend means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women in the country illegally.<\/p>\n
A series of federal judges have said that\u2019s not true and issued nationwide injunctions stopping his order from taking effect. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been on the bench for over four decades. I can\u2019t remember another case where the question presented was as clear as this one is. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order,\u201d U.S. District Judge John Coughenour said at a hearing this year in his Seattle courtroom.<\/p>\n
In Greenbelt, Md., a Washington suburb, U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman wrote that \u201cthe Supreme Court has resoundingly rejected and no court in the country has ever endorsed\u201d Trump\u2019s interpretation of birthright citizenship.<\/p>\n
Is Trump\u2019s order constitutional?<\/p>\n
The high court\u2019s ruling was a major victory for the Trump administration in that it limited an individual judge\u2019s authority in granting nationwide injunctions. The administration hailed the ruling as a monumental check on the powers of individual district court judges, whom Trump supporters have argued are usurping the president\u2019s authority with rulings blocking his priorities on immigration and other matters. <\/p>\n
But the Supreme Court did not address the merits of Trump\u2019s bid to enforce his birthright citizenship executive order. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe Trump administration made a strategic decision, which I think quite clearly paid off, that they were going to challenge not the judges\u2019 decisions on the merits, but on the scope of relief,\u201d said Jessica Levinson, a Loyola Law School professor. <\/p>\n
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi told reporters at the White House that the administration is \u201cvery confident\u201d that the high court will ultimately side with the administration on the merits of the case.<\/p>\n
Uncertainty ahead<\/p>\n
The justices kicked the cases challenging the birthright citizenship policy back down to the lower courts, where judges will have to decide how to tailor their orders to comply with the new ruling. The executive order remains blocked for at least 30 days, giving lower courts and the parties time to sort out the next steps.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court\u2019s ruling leaves open the possibility that groups challenging the policy could still get nationwide relief through class-action lawsuits and seek certification as a nationwide class. Within hours after the ruling, two class-action suits had been filed in Maryland and New Hampshire seeking to block Trump\u2019s order.<\/p>\n
But obtaining nationwide relief through a class action is difficult as courts have put up hurdles to doing so over the years, said Suzette Malveaux, a Washington and Lee University law school professor. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not the case that a class action is a sort of easy, breezy way of getting around this problem of not having nationwide relief,\u201d said Malveaux, who had urged the high court not to eliminate the nationwide injunctions. <\/p>\n
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who penned the court\u2019s dissenting opinion, urged the lower courts to \u201cact swiftly on such requests for relief and to adjudicate the cases as quickly as they can so as to enable this Court\u2019s prompt review\u201d in cases \u201cchallenging policies as blatantly unlawful and harmful as the Citizenship Order.\u201d <\/p>\n
Opponents of Trump\u2019s order warned there would be a patchwork of policies across the states, leading to chaos and confusion without nationwide relief. <\/p>\n
\u201cBirthright citizenship has been settled constitutional law for more than a century,\u201d said Krish O\u2019Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, a nonprofit that supports refugees and migrants. \u201cBy denying lower courts the ability to enforce that right uniformly, the Court has invited chaos, inequality, and fear.\u201d <\/p>\n
Sullivan and Richer write for the Associated Press. AP writers Mark Sherman and Lindsay Whitehurst in Washington and Mike Catalini in Trenton, N.J., contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WASHINGTON\u00a0\u2014\u00a0The legal battle over President Trump\u2019s move to end birthright citizenship is far from over despite his major…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":22782,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[20795,1582,276,6517,9958,20796,16665,2961,224,5337,20798,20799,153,1807,20797,20794,278,277,4352,1439],"class_list":{"0":"post-22781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-birthright-citizenship","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-california","11":"tag-case","12":"tag-country","13":"tag-executive-order","14":"tag-high-court","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-low-court","19":"tag-nationwide-injunction","20":"tag-policy","21":"tag-president-trump","22":"tag-relief","23":"tag-ruling","24":"tag-supreme-court","25":"tag-trump","26":"tag-trump-administration","27":"tag-u-s"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22782"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}