The legal groups that won the preservation of birthright citizenship at the Supreme Court this summer said the fight may not be over. They returned to federal court Tuesday to seek assurance from a federal court that President Donald Trump cannot take it away.
The plaintiffs in the case — a class of parents whose children would have been denied citizenship under Trump’s original order — filed a new motion Tuesday asking the federal judge overseeing their case to reiterate that his order guarantees birthright citizenship to all babies who are covered by their class.
The plaintiffs are asking the judge to either clarify that the existing order forbids the Trump administration from infringing citizenship rights for babies in the protected class or issue a new injunction that explicitly provides those protections.
In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s executive order that sought to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are here either temporarily or unlawfully. The Supreme Court’s ruling upholds long-recognized exceptions to birthright citizenship, including children born to diplomats and occupying armies.
The new legal effort comes just days after Trump again sought to limit birthright citizenship with a pair of executive orders that are narrower than the one overturned by the Supreme Court. These new orders seek to broaden the exceptions to automatic citizenship.
The first order expands the definition of people the administration deems eligible for automatic citizenship to include children of an “alien enemy,” a foreign government employee and a parent engaged in a commercial transaction to ensure citizenship.
The second order seeks to end “birth tourism,” in which foreign nationals travel to the U.S. to give birth so their children can receive citizenship.
The president last week called birthright citizenship a “disgrace.”
“They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen,” Trump said, referring to people who obtained their U.S. citizenship by being born on American soil.
“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel on the case.
“It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end,” he said.
The plaintiffs Wofsy represents, who successfully challenged Trump’s first birthright citizenship order, argued that these new orders violate the court’s ruling by purporting to strip citizenship from members of the protected class.
“To avoid any doubt in this regard, the Court should underscore that the government may not strip away class members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed assertions of Executive power over birthright citizenship,” they wrote in the motion.
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