A divided United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutional right of birthright citizenship , rejecting President Donald Trump’s planned restrictions and invalidating a central plank of his immigration agenda. The court said an executive order Trump issued hours after his inauguration last year couldn’t be squared with the Constitution’s 14th Amendment , which has long been understood as guaranteeing citizenship to virtually everyone born on U.S. soil. The case tested what it means to be an American. Trump’s order sought to restrict birthright citizenship to babies with at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or green-card holder, affecting an estimated 250,000 children born to undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors each year. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community ,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. “The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in this land. We keep that promise today.” The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, guarantees citizenship to anyone who is born in the U.S. and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Critics said Trump was seeking to rewrite that provision by arguing it was designed to cover only the children of freed slaves. Federal immigration statutes enacted in 1940 and 1952 use identical language. The vote to invalidate the executive order was six to three, though one member of the majority, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, said he disagreed with the court’s constitutional analysis and would have instead thrown out the executive order as violating a federal statute. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissented. “The court has repurposed the Fourteenth Amendment to protect its own set of preferred rights that the Reconstruction Congress never contemplated and that cannot find support in its text,” Thomas wrote for himself and Gorsuch, referring to the period after the Civil War. Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the court’s three liberals joined Roberts’ majority opinion. Supreme Court thwarts Trump bid to oust Fed’s Cook for nowTrump’s US$100,000 H-1B visa application fee rejected by judge The Supreme Court ruled in an 1898 decision known as U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark that the citizenship clause covered a man born in California to two Chinese parents. The six to two decision concluded the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was written to exclude only a few narrow classes of people, including the children of invaders, foreign ambassadors and Native Americans. The court heard arguments April 1 with Trump in attendance for the first half of the session. His appearance marked the first time in the court’s recorded history that a sitting president had gone to an argument. Democrats said the executive order also could have stripped millions of current Americans of their citizenship, along with their ability to vote and get passports. Lower courts had uniformly said the executive order was unlawful. In the case before the justices, a federal district judge in New Hampshire ruled against Trump, and the administration appealed directly to the Supreme Court, bypassing the appeals court level. Bloomberg.com
U.S. Supreme Court backs birthright citizenship in blow to Trump
