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A federal appeals court yesterday upheld a lower court injunction that blocked an effort by Trump to restrict birthright citizenship from going into effect.
The ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of appeals comes roughly a month after the Supreme Court curbed a district court injunction preventing Trump’s policy from going into effect and asked lower courts to reconsider the scope of the injunction to ensure it was not too broad.
The appellate court, in a 48-page decision, determined it was not.
“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,” the court wrote.
Appeals court upholds nationwide block on Trump’s birthright citizenship order, continued
Trump signed an executive order in January that guaranteed birthright citizenship only to infants who have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. The order amounted to an effort to redefine the 14th Amendment, which has widely been interpreted as conferring citizenship to any person born in the United States.
The appellate court today called Trump’s order “invalid.”
“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,’” it wrote.
A day after Trump signed the executive order on birthright citizenship, a group of Democratic attorneys general, resulting in the initial district court injunction.
The appellate court, noting that the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the case in its June decision, said the Democratic states would most likely succeed in proving Trump’s order is unconstitutional, framing that consideration as the core of its decision to uphold the nationwide block on the order.
“Because State Plaintiffs have standing and are likely to succeed in demonstrating that the Executive Order is unconstitutional, we affirm the district court’s grant of a preliminary injunction and its determination that a universal preliminary injunction is necessary to give the States complete relief on their claims,” the ruling read.