Supreme Court to Review Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Curbs (1)

The US Supreme Court said it will review President Donald Trump’s planned rollback of automatic birthright citizenship, setting up a high-stakes showdown over what long has been understood to be a constitutional right.

The clash will test a Trump executive order that lower courts have uniformly said runs afoul of the Constitution, federal immigration law and Supreme Court precedent. The justices will hear an administration appeal in a suit being pressed by affected people.

It’s the first time Trump’s plan has been squarely before the high court. In June the conservative-controlled court ruled on a legal question stemming from the birthright citizenship cases, making it harder for federal trial judges to block disputed government policies nationwide, but that decision didn’t address whether the executive order was legal.

The timing of the decision to hear the case means the court will probably hear arguments early next year and rule by July.

Trump is seeking to jettison the understanding that the Constitution’s 14th Amendment confers citizenship on virtually everyone born on US soil. Trump would restrict that to babies with at least one parent who is a US citizen or green-card holder, meaning that even the newborn children of people on temporary visas wouldn’t automatically become Americans.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, confers citizenship on anyone who is born in the US and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The clause “was adopted to confer citizenship on the newly freed slaves and their children, not on the children of aliens temporarily visiting the United States or of illegal aliens,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top courtroom lawyer, told the Supreme Court.

The challengers said Trump’s executive order “is squarely contrary to the constitutional text, this Court’s precedents, Congress’s dictates, longstanding executive branch practice, scholarly consensus, and well over a century of our nation’s everyday practice.”

In the case the justices will consider, a federal district judge in New Hampshire ruled against Trump. The administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing the appeals court level.

The high court opted not to take up a separate challenge pressed by four states led by Washington. That case had reached the appeals court level, with the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals ruling against the administration.

The granted case is Trump v. Barbara, 25-365.

(Updates with details on case starting in fourth paragraph.)

To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Elizabeth Wasserman at ewasserman2@bloomberg.net

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