The US Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected President Donald Trump’s bid to restrict birthright citizenship, preserving the constitutional guarantee that has long granted American citizenship to nearly everyone born on US soil.
In a 6-3 decision delivered on the final day of its term, the court upheld lower court rulings blocking Trump’s executive order, which sought to deny automatic citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas.
Trump signed the order on the first day of his second term, arguing that such children are not entitled to citizenship under the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed the long-standing interpretation of the Constitution.
“Children born in the United States to parents unlawfully or temporarily present are ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ of the United States and are citizens at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause,” Roberts wrote.
The decision marks a significant setback for Trump’s immigration agenda, which has centred on tightening immigration rules and expanding deportations of undocumented migrants.
In an unprecedented move for a sitting US president, Trump personally attended oral arguments before the Supreme Court in April. He remained for the presentation by Solicitor General John Sauer but departed before arguments by American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) lawyer Cecillia Wang, who defended birthright citizenship.
During the hearing, Sauer argued that unrestricted birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and so-called “birth tourism”, in which foreign nationals travel to the United States primarily to give birth so their children acquire US citizenship.
The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The Trump administration argued that the amendment, adopted after the Civil War to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people, was never intended to apply to children born to undocumented migrants or temporary visitors.
Its case rested on the claim that people living in the United States unlawfully, or on temporary visas, are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the country and therefore cannot pass automatic citizenship to their children.
The Supreme Court, however, reaffirmed its long-established interpretation of the amendment, first set out in the landmark 1898 case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which held that a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a US citizen by birth despite the restrictive immigration laws of the era.
The ruling preserves a constitutional principle that has remained in force for more than a century and deals a significant blow to Trump’s effort to narrow birthright citizenship through executive action.
AFP
