The U.S. Supreme Court is officially taking up a review of whether President Donald Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship is constitutional, Axios reported Friday.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a right to citizenship for anyone born in the United States and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” — which courts and legal scholars have always interpreted to mean anyone subject to the laws of the country, which would mean everyone except foreign diplomats, invading armies, or indigenous people enrolled in tribal nations.
President Donald Trump, however, declared in an executive order that he would no longer apply this right to the children of noncitizens, either, making it official U.S. policy to deny the children of noncitizens access to passports and other federal documents that would establish their citizenship.
A series of lower courts blocked the implementation of this order earlier this year, prompting the Trump administration to challenge the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide injunctions in the first place. That case went to the Supreme Court, which decided to limit the use of injunctions in certain circumstances — but left the core issue of whether Trump’s birthright citizenship order was constitutional in the first place unresolved for the time being.
After that order, another federal court blocked Trump’s citizenship order following the guidelines the Supreme Court laid out, which has now brought that issue before the justices.
“The Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted to grant citizenship to newly freed slaves and their children — not to the children of temporary visitors or illegal aliens,” the Justice Department argued to the court.
Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern has noted this is not true, and the amendment was understood even by lawmakers at the time to grant citizenship to children of immigrants as well.
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