On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants. Even though a federal judge has blocked it, Trump is now hoping the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) will intervene on his behalf.
NBC News reported Thursday that Trump now wants the nine justices on the Supreme Court to limit the injunctions against his order to the individual plaintiffs challenging it — meaning that he could continue implementing it on a grand scale. According to Economist reporter Steven Mazie, the administration's lawyers called the temporary restraining orders "a serious threat to the Executive Branch's authority."
U.S. District Judge John Cougheneur already sided with four Democratic state attorneys general in January to temporarily block the order from going into effect, calling it "blatantly unconstitutional." if Trump's petition to the High Court is successful, the stays granted to plaintiffs like those attorneys general would stand, while the executive order would be in effect elsewhere for other children of undocumented immigrants.
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Trump's gambit was widely panned by journalists, attorneys and others as both illegal and impossible to practically implement. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, who is a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, pointed out that there would be significant logistical hurdles if SCOTUS allowed the restraining orders for specific plaintiffs to remain in place while banning birthright citizenship elsewhere.
"As the states and the circuit courts have already noted, this is an especially bad case to overturn nationwide injunctions because anyone born outside of the plaintiff states has freedom to travel, so you’d have peoples’ citizenship switching on and off across state lines, which is a complete mess," Reichlin-Melnick posted to Bluesky.
DePaul University sociology professor Jessica Polos also questioned how a ruling favorable to Trump would be applied. While acknowledging she's "no lawyer," Polos observed that if the children of undocumented immigrants aren't subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then they could ultimately be "allowed immunity from all of our laws."
Retired attorney Michael Lehroff observed that Trump wanted to ignore the Constitution's Emoluments Clause while insisting on absolute presidential immunity and "negating birthright citizenship, which is right smack at the beginning of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment." Media Matters for America research director Craig Harrington sarcastically remarked that he was "excited to read Clarence Thomas' fervent defense of stripping citizenship from native-born Americans," while attorney and legal analyst Jeffrey Evan Gold tweeted: "Constitution, what Constitution?"
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Click here to read NBC's full report.