The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court this week, urging the justices to strike down President Donald Trump’s executive order dismantling the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship.
Trump’s order would require anyone born in the United States to have U.S. citizen parentage to qualify for citizenship — a dramatic departure from the Constitution, which says that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Under Trump’s order, people born in the country to noncitizens would be ineligible for passports or other federal documents related to citizenship.
USCCB implored the Supreme Court to reject this as a violation of the law and of human rights.
“As Catholics, amici are guided by the compassion of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” wrote the bishops. “Our concern for our neighbors proceeds from God’s command to love others as he loved us. John 13:35. The Conference is saddened by the ‘climate of fear and anxiety’ and the ‘vilification of immigrants’ that is all too common in the rhetoric concerning immigration policy.”
“Thankfully, obstacles and prejudices over past generations have not prevented those generations of immigrants from making enormous contributions to the development of our great nation,” the brief continued. “But to protect God-given human dignity, which is inherent in the judicial task of rendering just judgments, this Court should hold that the Executive Order is unconstitutional.”
The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in the birthright citizenship case at the start of April. Several lower courts have already ruled against Trump’s order, and the Supreme Court already ruled on a related but separate case that governed lower courts’ power to issue injunctions against orders of this type.
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