Birthright Citizenship

Appeals Court ruled against Trump on Birthright Citizenship

President Trump loses this one, for now

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 the 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.

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Trump is now pinning his hopes on the Supreme Court, where his Justice Department petitioned the justices last week to overturn these lower court decisions and greenlight his order.