A federal judge has banned the Trump administration from implementing the president’s executive order on birthright citizenship.
U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante ruled that the “deprivation of U.S. citizenship and an abrupt change of policy” is “irreparable harm.” U.S. citizenship is the “greatest privilege that exists in the world,” the judge said, as per The Straits Times.
The ruling follows the Supreme Court limiting lower courts’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions. In the June 27 decision, Justice Amy Coney Barrett explained, “The injunctions before us today reflect a more recent development: district courts asserting the power to prohibit enforcement of a law or policy against anyone. These injunctions—known as ‘universal injunctions’—likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.”
Barrett explained that the “applications do not raise — and thus we do not address — the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act. The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.”
President Trump’s January executive order asserted that the Fourteenth Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” but has “always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told NBC News prior to Thursday’s ruling that the Trump administration is “committed to lawfully implementing the President’s Executive Order to protect the meaning and value of American citizenship and which restores the Fourteenth Amendment to its original intent.”
