WASHINGTON (AP) — supreme court They are to meet privately on Friday to discuss hot-button issues — President Donald Trump ‘s birthright citizenship An order declaring that a child born to parents who are illegally or temporarily in the United States is not a U.S. citizen.
The justices could say as early as Monday whether they will hear Trump’s appeal of the lower court’s ruling, which the court uniformly vacated. citizenship restrictions. They are not in effect anywhere in the United States.
If the court intervenes now, the case is expected to be heard this spring and a final judgment rendered by early summer.
The birthright citizenship order, signed by President Trump on the first day of his second term in the White House, is part of his administration’s broader immigration crackdown. Other measures include a surge in immigration enforcement in some cities and the first peacetime invocation of the 18th-century Foreign Enemies Act.
The administration faces multiple challenges Court challengeand the High Court has sent mixed signals in the emergency orders it has issued. The justices effectively halted the use of the Hostile Alien Act, which allows Venezuelan suspected gang members to be quickly deported without a court hearing, but also allowed the Los Angeles area to reinstate blanket immigration suspensions after a lower court blocked the practice of suspending people based solely on race, language, occupation or place of residence.
The justices are also considering the administration’s emergency appeal for permission to deploy the National Guard to the Chicago area to crack down on immigration. A lower court blocked the deployment indefinitely.
Birthright citizenship is the first Trump immigration policy to go to court for a final ruling. President Trump’s order upends more than 125 years of understanding that the 14th Amendment grants citizenship to all people born on American soil, with exceptions for children of foreign diplomats and foreign occupation forces.
Even after the Supreme Court’s ruling in late June restricting judges’ ability to issue nationwide injunctions, lower courts have struck down executive orders as unconstitutional or potentially unconstitutional in a series of rulings.
Although the Supreme Court restrained the use of nationwide injunctions, it did not preclude other court orders that could have nationwide effects, such as class actions or lawsuits brought by individual states. At the time, the justices did not decide whether the underlying citizenship order was constitutional.
But every lower court that has considered the issue has concluded that President Trump’s order violates or likely violates the 14th Amendment, which is meant to guarantee citizenship to black people, including former slaves.
The government is appealing two cases.
In July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that a group of states suing over the order needed a nationwide injunction to prevent problems caused by birthright citizenship, which takes effect in some states but not others.
Also in July, a federal judge in New Hampshire blocked a civil rights order in a class action lawsuit targeting all affected children.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the legal team in the New Hampshire case, asked the court to dismiss the appeal because the administration’s “arguments are very flimsy,” said ACLU attorney Cody Wofsey. “But if the court decides to hear this case, we are ready to take on Mr. Trump and win.”
Birthright citizenship is based on a long-standing rule that automatically makes anyone born in the United States a citizen, including children born to mothers who entered the country illegally. This right was established immediately after the Civil War in the first sentence of Act No. 1. 14th Amendment.
The administration argued that noncitizen children were not entitled to citizenship because they were not “subjects to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
“The lower court’s decision invalidated a policy most important to the President and his administration, in a way that undermined border security,” Attorney General D. John Sauer wrote in a letter urging the high court’s review. “These decisions confer the privileges of American citizenship to hundreds of thousands of ineligible people without legal legitimacy.”
