A federal appeals court said Wednesday that President Trump’s executive order curtailing birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.
The policy, which has been the subject of a complicated monthslong legal back-and-forth, is currently on hold. But Wednesday’s decision appears to mark the first time that an appellate court has weighed in on the merits of Mr. Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship for many children of undocumented immigrants by executive order.
A panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit wrote that Mr. Trump’s order is “invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment.
On the first day of Mr. Trump’s second term, he signed an executive order that said people born in the United States should not automatically get citizenship if one parent is undocumented and the other isn’t a citizen or green-card holder, or if both parents are in the U.S. on temporary visas. The order directed federal agencies to stop issuing citizenship documents within 30 days to people who fall into those categories.
The order drew a flurry of lawsuits, as most legal experts have said the 14th Amendment — which was ratified in 1868 — automatically offers citizenship to virtually everybody born within the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status, with extremely narrow exceptions.
The Trump administration argues the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment does not apply to people whose parents are in the country illegally or temporarily — citing a clause that says citizenship is granted to those who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Those parents do not necessarily have “allegiance” to the country, the government argues, so they therefore aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction.”
The 9th Circuit disagreed. It wrote Wednesday that a plain reading of the 14th Amendment suggests that citizenship was meant to be granted to anybody who is “subject to the laws and authority of the United States.”
“The Defendants’ proposed interpretation of the Citizenship Clause relies on a network of inferences that are unmoored from the accepted legal principles of 1868,” the judges wrote.
“Perhaps the Executive Branch, recognizing that it could not change the Constitution, phrased its Executive Order in terms of a strained and novel interpretation of the Constitution,” the opinion said.
This is a breaking story; it will be updated.
Joe Walsh is a senior editor for digital politics at CBS News. Joe previously covered breaking news for Forbes and local news in Boston.
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