Washington — A federal appeals court on Friday became the latest court to determine the Trump administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship is likely unconstitutional.
In a 100-page ruling, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Boston district court’s injunction that blocked the government from enforcing an executive order signed by President Trump to significantly narrow birthright citizenship, the concept that people born in the U.S. are automatically citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The appeals court ruled in favor of plaintiff states and against the Trump administration.
Other cases challenging the president’s effort to restrict birthright citizenship have been making their way through the courts, and they haven’t been decided in the president’s favor.
“Our nation’s history of efforts to restrict birthright citizenship — from Dred Scott in the decade before the Civil War to the attempted justification for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Wong Kim Ark — has not been a proud one,” the court’s chief justice wrote. “Indeed, those efforts each have been rejected, once by the people through constitutional amendment in 1868 and once by the court relying on the same amendment three decades later, and at a time when tensions over immigration were also high.”
“The ‘lessons of history’ thus give us every reason to be wary of now blessing this most recent effort to break with our established tradition of recognizing birthright citizenship and to make citizenship depend on Thea actions of one’s parents rather than — in all but the rarest of circumstances — the simple fact of being born in the United States,” the appeals court concluded.
CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment on the ruling.
In Mr. Trump’s first week in office, he signed an executive order that sought to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants or temporary visa holders. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868, has long been interpreted to automatically grant citizenship to virtually everybody born on U.S. soil, even if their parents are in the country illegally or temporarily. Federal judges in several states have blocked the order from taking effect.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in two different cases, one brought by four states and another by parents whose children would be impacted by the policy.
The birthright citizenship issue reached the high court earlier this year, but the justices did not rule on the merits, instead curtailing lower court judges’ power to issue nationwide injunctions blocking Mr. Trump’s executive order.
Melissa Quinn
contributed to this report.
