A federal appeals court blocked President Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, calling the order unconstitutional.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the order. A three-judge panel ruled 2-1 that the “district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree.” They added, “We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the States complete relief.”
“We conclude that the Executive Order is invalid because it contradicts the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment’s grant of citizenship to ‘all persons born in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'” the majority further wrote.
The ruling is an affront to the Supreme Court’s decision 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.”
