A federal district court today issued a preliminary injunction preventing the Administration from enforcing President Trump’s latest effort to restrict birthright citizenship.
The ruling means that the Administration can’t enforce President Trump’s post-Barbara executive order on birthright citizenship.
We expected this result, given that President Trump’s latest EO plainly flies in the face of Barbara (and the Fourteenth Amendment and federal law). The only surprising thing about this whole episode is that President Trump issued a post-Barbara EO at all. (But maybe that’s not even all that surprising.)
Some background may help:
Recall that President Trump issued an EO on his first day of his second term that purported to deprive birthright citizenship to individuals born to parents who were in the country temporarily or unlawfully. The Supreme Court this summer ruled in Trump v. Barbara that this violated the Fourteenth Amendment and federal law. (The Court split 5-4–the slimmest of margins–on the constitutional question. Still, a Court ruling is a Court ruling, no matter the head-count.)
Only a month after the Court ruled, President Trump issued a second EO purporting to limit birthright citizenship. This time, the EO says that individuals born to a parent who is an “enemy alien” or a “foreign government employee,” or who “engage[d] in a commercial transaction” to ensure that the individual was born in the United States do not qualify for birthright citizenship.
Plaintiffs sued again, with a class that’s identical to the one in Barbara, and argued that the new EO runs directly contrary to Barbara.
The district court agreed. In short, the court said that Barbara dictated the outcome here, and that the Administration’s claims that the second EO worked within the Barbara parameters simply misread Barbara.
The court enjoined the Administration from enforcing the EO against the class “and from taking any other action to interfere with, deny, or fail to recognize the citizenship of any member of the certified class until further order of this Court . . . .”