Appeals court rejects Trump bid to ban birthright citizenshipThe denial of the president’s request to reinstate his order banning birthright citizenship sets up a potential Supreme Court battle.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/02/20/trump-birthright-citizenship-appeal-case/A federal appeals court panel denied a Justice Department bid to reinstate President Donald Trump’s executive order aimed at curbing birthright citizenship, edging the battle over the order’s constitutionality closer to a potential Supreme Court showdown.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit on Wednesday declined the administration’s emergency request to immediately lift a nationwide block on Trump’s executive order, rejecting its claim that the preliminary injunction was overly broad. It is the first time an appellate panel has weighed in on one of the several lawsuits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order.
Justice Department lawyers had argued that the court’s injunction — which blocked Trump’s order nationwide after a lawsuit from four Democratic-led states — was harmful because it stymied Trump’s effort to “address the ongoing crisis at the southern border” and implement an immigration policy designed to combat “significant threats to national security and public safety.”
The three-judge panel unanimously rejected the request, with Judges William C. Canby Jr. and Milan D. Smith Jr. writing in their order that the administration had not made a “strong showing” that it would succeed on the merits of its appeal.
In a six-page concurring opinion, Judge Danielle Forrest wrote that setting aside a court order on an emergency basis should be the exception rather than the rule, and that the injunction did not meet the bar.
“A controversy, yes. Even an important controversy, yes. An emergency, not necessarily,” wrote Forrest, who was nominated to her seat by Trump in 2019.
In rejecting the emergency plea, the panel upheld a nationwide injunction ordered Feb. 6 by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle, who called Trump’s executive order “blatantly unconstitutional,” while paving the way for the case to be brought before the Supreme Court.
The lawsuit, filed Jan. 21 in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and joined by Oregon, Arizona and Illinois, is one of at least six legal challenges to be brought by states and civil rights groups challenging the constitutionality of Trump’s efforts to restrict birthright citizenship by executive order.
So far, federal judges in Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Maryland have also blocked the executive order following separate legal challenges.
“Our argument is simple and true — birthright citizenship is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution,” Nick Brown, the attorney general of Washington state — a lead plaintiff in the case — said in a statement this month. “The president may not care about the Constitution or the rule of law, but we do.”
Trump’s executive order — signed the day of his inauguration — seeks to deny birthright citizenship for the babies of undocumented immigrants and certain categories of foreigners by directing U.S. government agencies to no longer grant them documentation.
It seeks to reinterpret the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868, which automatically grants citizenship to all people born on U.S. soil.
The Supreme Court upheld this right in 1898 when it ruled that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco but had been denied reentry to the United States after a trip abroad because of his Chinese descent, was a U.S. citizen.
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