U.S. Supreme Court denies Trump bid to end birthright citizenship

The U.S. Sublime margaret court on tues ruled against chairman Donald Trump's executive director order limiting birthright citizenship, scuttling one of his top priorities in his crackdown on immigration, in a highly anticipated decision that confirms a lower-court finding.

The president's order, not retroactive, would have denied citizenship to those born to parents who are in the United States without authorization or whose presence is lawful but temporary, such those on a work or student visa.

The 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara marked the second time this year that the court has invalidated a major Trump initiative, following its February decision to strike down his sweeping global tariffs. Conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented.

The 14th Amendment — passed in 1866 and ratified two years later in the aftermath of the Civil War that ended slavery in the U.S. — overturned a notorious 1857 Supreme Court decision, Dred Scott v. Sandford, that had declared that people of African descent could never be U.S. Citizens.

It has essentially guaranteed citizenship ​for babies born in the U.S., with only narrow exceptions, such as the children of foreign diplomats or an enemy occupying force.

Trump, who has repeatedly tested the limits of presidential power in domestic and foreign policy, issued the order last year on his first day back in office as part of a suite of policies to crack down on legal and illegal immigration. Critics have accused the Republican president of racial and religious discrimination in his approach to immigration.

Trump attended the U.S. Government's oral argument before the court on April 1, the first time a president has ever done so.

U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship

Following Tuesday's ruling, Trump wrote on social media that the decision was "too bad ​for our Country, but we can easily make it up in Congress through Legislation, with the support of the President, that has now been determined during this process."

"No long and unwieldy ​Constitutional Amendment is necessary! Congress should start TODAY to work on ending expensive and unfair to our Country, Birthright Citizenship. They will have my Complete and Total Support!" Trump wrote.

Taryn Wilgus Null, senior counsel at the Democracy Defenders Fund, calls that a "gross misunderstanding" of the ruling.

"What the court actually held was that the executive order violated the Constitution," Wilgus Null said in an interview with As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "It violated the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment. If our country wants to change that, it would take a constitutional amendment. So President Trump is just wrong about that."

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The challengers to Trump's order said the Supreme Court had already settled that question in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which recognized that the citizenship granted under the 14th Amendment grants citizenship by birth on U.S. Soil, including to the children of foreign nationals.

Chief Justice John Roberts, who authored the opinion, pointed to that 1898 ruling: "Not surprisingly, then, in the ​128 years since, we have repeatedly understood the rule of Wong Kim Ark to guarantee citizenship to all children born in the United States and subject to its power. We see no reason to depart from that view today," Roberts wrote.

Roberts said there was "scant evidence" to support the Trump administration's "dramatically revisionist view" of how to interpret the citizenship language of the 14th Amendment to limit birthright ⁠citizenship.

"If Congress intended to limit American citizenship to the children of those domiciled in ⁠the United States, nothing in the succinct language of the Citizenship Clause conveyed that design," he wrote.

Critics of the executive order had argued it had the potential to impact, on average, 250,000 children born in the U.S. Each year. In one of several "friend of the court" briefs, a group of municipal and local officials argued that Trump's order would create "stateless" children subject to stigma and discrimination, whose access to basic services and health care would be compromised.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed with the ruling to reject Trump's directive in ⁠a concurring opinion — but on his view that it contravenes the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act codifying birthright citizenship ⁠rights, not the 14th Amendment itself. Kavanaugh said Congress could carve out exceptions for birthright citizenship in legislation if it chose to do so, consistent with the 14th Amendment.

The legal challenge to Trump's directive involved a class-action lawsuit filed in New Hampshire by parents and children whose citizenship was threatened by the executive order.

The provision at issue — the 14th Amendment's "citizenship clause" — states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside."

The administration asserted that ‌the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means that being born in the U.S. Is not enough for citizenship, and excludes the babies of immigrants who are in the country illegally or whose presence is lawful but temporary, such as university students or those on work visas.

During the arguments, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, representing the administration, said the promise of citizenship for virtually any baby born on U.S. Soil has spawned what he called a sprawling industry of "birth tourism."

Sauer said that "uncounted thousands of foreigners from potentially hostile nations have flocked to give birth in the United States in recent decades," to secure citizenship for their children. Asked to explain how serious the issue has become, Sauer primarily cited media reports and conceded that "no one knows for sure."

The Center for Immigration Studies, which is in favour of restricting immigration, and the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute, have estimated that number could be somewhere around 20,000 to 25,000 births per year — about two to three per cent of all births in the U.S.

While many countries do not guarantee citizenship by birth, including Britain and Australia, the push from the Trump administration comes as it's clamped down on legal immigration and denied nearly all asylum claims, aside from white applicants from South Africa, a country in which Black citizens are overrepresented under the poverty line following decades of racial segregation.

As well, the administration has undertaken an expansive deportation campaign compared to previous Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, with the Supreme Court last year in an unsigned order making it less challenging for the government to send deportees to countries not of their origin.

The Census Bureau has reported that U.S. Population growth last year was at one of its lowest levels in recent memory, aside from the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, largely due to a historic decline in net international migration.

Read the Supreme Court's ruling on birthright citizenship:

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