Judge blocks Trump’s new attempt to limit birthright citizenship in the US

Donald Trump’s latest effort to limit the right to birthright citizenship has been blocked. A federal judge in Maryland has temporarily halted the administration’s new attempt to deny U.S. citizenship to a group of children whose parents are in the country temporarily or unlawfully, finding that the executive order likely conflicts with a recent Supreme Court decision recognizing that those children are U.S. citizens.

Judge Deborah L. Boardman of the U.S. District Court in Maryland issued a preliminary order Wednesday barring the government from enforcing the executive order Trump signed on August 6. The measure bars several federal agencies, including the State and Homeland Security departments and the Social Security Administration, from taking any action to deny, interfere with or fail to recognize the citizenship of the children covered by the lawsuit.

The ruling represents another setback for Trump after the Supreme Court rejected his first attempt in June to end automatic citizenship for children of people who are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

The dispute centers on the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, whose Citizenship Clause establishes that all people born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. In June, the Supreme Court ruled by a 6-3 vote that the children covered by the class action affected by Trump’s first order were U.S. citizens at birth.

Boardman found that the ruling had already settled the issue for the children protected by her order. “No presidential executive order can undo [what the Supreme Court has done],” she wrote, adding that the high court’s decision is “the law of the land.”

Trump’s new order is narrower than the one that triggered the previous legal battle, but it introduces several categories under which certain children could be excluded from citizenship. They include children of people classified as “alien enemies,” a category the administration has applied to alleged members of transnational criminal organizations, as well as children of foreign government employees in the United States.

The order also seeks to deny citizenship in cases involving so-called “birth tourism,” in which a woman is considered to have traveled to the country to give birth with the intention of having her child automatically obtain U.S. citizenship. The decree also mentions situations involving fraud or a “commercial transaction” related to obtaining citizenship.

That wording raised questions about how broadly the measure could be applied. Boardman noted that the decree could be interpreted broadly enough to affect even people who purchased an airline ticket to travel to the United States. She also warned about the risk that the administration could deny citizenship to children based on allegations against their parents.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs, including the CASA and Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project groups, argued that historically accepted exceptions to birthright citizenship are very limited and accused the government of attempting to expand them through an executive order.

The Justice Department defended a different interpretation. Its lawyers argued that the Supreme Court’s decision did not establish that all children born to noncitizen parents are citizens without exception, and pointed out that historical categories, such as children of diplomats and certain “alien enemies,” are not covered by the guarantee.

They also argued that the lawsuit was premature because federal agencies had not yet issued the guidance needed to implement the decree. However, Boardman found that intervention was necessary before those guidelines took effect.

The judge clarified that the agencies may still develop guidance on how the government intends to implement the order, but they cannot use it to deny citizenship to the children protected by her ruling.

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