BOSTON (AP) — Over a span of a month this summer, four separate federal courts rejected President Donald Trump’s executive order ending automatic citizenship for the children of people in the country illegally or temporarily. On Friday, one more court weighed in, and the result was no different.A three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston said in a unanimous decision that the Republican president cannot enforce the order. The court joined the four others that earlier had issued or upheld decisions blocking it nationwide.The U.S. Supreme Court is almost certain to have the final word on birthright citizenship. The Trump administration has already asked the high court to take up the issue. Federal judges have made clear how much his order conflicts with Supreme Court precedent, to say nothing of the Constitution. The Supreme Court is not bound by what those lower court judges have said or even its own past rulings. Nonetheless, those losses could mean an uphill fight for his administration even in front of the justices, who have so far sided with the president on many legal challenges to his effort to remake the government.
The 14th AmendmentThe right to citizenship at birth has long been a bedrock principle in the United States, widely accepted to have been granted by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868. It was intended to ensure that Black people, including former slaves, had citizenship.The amendment includes a citizenship clause that says all people born or naturalized in the U.S. and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens.Administration lawyers have argued that inclusion of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means that citizenship is not automatically conferred to children based on their birth in the U.S. They contend it requires children to have primary allegiance to the U.S., and people who are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily — and by extension, their children — cannot claim that because their permanent home is another country to which that allegiance is tied.
