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Trump’s new birthright restrictions face legal dispute
The president’s last measure donald trump to restrict automatic citizenship faces a legal challenge, months after the Supreme Court reject his previous attempt to overturn long-standing guarantees for children born in the United States to noncitizen parents.
The lawyers who managed to overturn the initial restrictions on trump to birthright citizenship asked a judge Tuesday to declare that one of two executive orders the president signed on Aug. 6 violates an existing court order. That order currently prohibits the government from denying citizenship to babies whose mothers have temporary visas or are undocumented immigrants who are in the United States illegally.
The American Civil Liberties Union and other immigrant advocacy groups filed a challenge to the new executive order of trump before a New Hampshire federal judge handling the previous birthright citizenship case, who had approved that case as a class action.
“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 lawyers wrote. “The court should make clear that defendants cannot deprive class members of their birthright under these or any other executive actions.”
In a separate case in Maryland, lawyers who had also challenged Trump’s original order on birthright citizenship asked a judge to reopen those proceedings “to get clarity” from the administration about the scope of the new order. trump and whether it has the effect of depriving of citizenship from children whose status is protected by the litigation.
The president’s Aug. 6 directives primarily target so-called “baby tourism,” with the goal of preventing foreigners from coming to the United States to give birth and denying citizenship to babies if their noncitizen parents paid money to someone or committed fraud to take advantage of the birthright guarantee.
The challenge in New Hampshire centers on the question of citizenship requirements.
The original executive order of trump to deny citizenship to newborns of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors was overturned in June by the Supreme Court. The court’s decision, with a conservative majority, represented a severe setback for one of the most aggressive policies of the president’s hardline immigration agenda, but trump He promised to look for other options to restrict citizenship.
The first new order of trump instructs the secretaries of State and of National security to adopt new rules or update existing policies to allow immigration authorities to deny or revoke visas, or otherwise prevent entry to foreign nationals arriving in the US “for the purpose of giving birth on US soil.”
There are no clear statistics on how many children this order would cover, especially given the difficulties in proving that a parent came to the United States for the purpose of giving birth. He Migration Policy Institute has identified federal government data sets with estimates ranging from 9,600 to 26,000 births annually, out of the more than 3.6 million babies born in the United States each year.
The other order seeks to expand the limited exceptions to birthright citizenship that Supreme Court has recognized, including the children of foreign diplomats and “enemies” involved in a “hostile occupation.” The order of trump would apply to children of a broader category of foreign nationals who work for their governments or other international organizations in the US, are members of designated terrorist organizations, or paid or committed fraud to give birth in the US.
When he signed the measures, trump He told reporters that he was acting in response to a “very unfortunate decision” by the Supreme Court and that he was “making adjustments because it is very unfair.”
The immigration advocates who managed to defeat the first order of trump on birthright citizenship denounced these measures.
“The Supreme Court has already resolved this issue: birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution,” he declared. Cody Wofsydeputy director of the PImmigrant Rights Project of the Aclus. “No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution.”
