The legal team that defended birthright citizenship in the Supreme Court is seeking to thwart President Donald Trump’s new effort to limit “birth tourism.”
In a filing Tuesday before the same federal district judge who blocked Trump’s previous birthright citizenship push, the attorneys requested a block against one of two new executive orders narrowing citizenship eligibility.
The filing argues that the Supreme Court ruling, which backed the longstanding 14th Amendment right of people born in the country to be granted U.S. citizenship, limited the exceptions of those who do not qualify and doesn’t give the president leeway for carving new exemptions.
“Faced with the Supreme Court’s rejection of his effort to rewrite the Citizenship Clause, the President has apparently decided to keep trying,” the attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups wrote in the request for a preliminary injunction.
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“If the President issues 100 orders seeking to create new exceptions to the sacred guarantee of the Citizenship Clause, all 100 will be equally illegal,” the attorneys wrote. “And nothing requires this Court to countenance the continued assault on this foundational constitutional principle or issue an endless string of EO-specific injunctions.”
The latest Trump executive orders follow his June loss in the Supreme Court, where he sought to exclude from citizenship children of undocumented immigrants or those with temporary authorization to be in the country.
“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 ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”
One of the new orders bars executive departments and agencies from issuing citizenship documents to people whose parents are deemed “alien enemies,” whose parents work for foreign governments or whose parents work for international organizations with immunity. It also attempts to deny citizenship when a parent “engaged in a commercial transaction” to guarantee being in the country at the time of birth.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff who’s led the administration’s hard-line effort to restrict immigration, described the aim in the Oval Office.
“People come here, pretend to be a tourist, pretend to be a visitor — say they want to go to Disneyland, they want to go visit a monument or go to a national park, but the real reason they’re here is to have a child,” Miller said Thursday.
The executive order’s attempt to crack down on “birth tourism” is troublingly ambiguous, the filing states, pointing out that the lead plaintiff in the case, identified only as Barbara, bought a bus ticket on her journey to the U.S.
“The government’s vague new exception would thus set it up as the arbiter of which children deserve citizenship based on its assessment of their parents’ particular circumstances,” the attorneys wrote.
The ACLU, some of their state affiliates, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund joined the filing.
Although the citizenship clause doesn’t grant the right to children of ambassadors and other representatives of foreign sovereigns, the attorneys argued the new executive order goes too far because it could also apply to staff at embassies who don’t have full diplomatic immunity, such as janitors and groundskeepers.
Another executive order Trump signed Thursday directs the state and homeland security secretaries to prevent immigrants from entering the country to give birth.
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