A federal appeals court on Wednesday issued another major blow to President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, ruling that it’s unconstitutional and upholding a nationwide block against the controversial policy.
The 2-1 ruling from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals is significant because the Supreme Court late last month ordered lower courts to take a second look at a set of nationwide injunctions issued earlier this year that halted Trump’s implementation of his Day One order to ensure they weren’t broader than necessary.
The San Francisco-based appeals court decided that one such injunction issued by a federal judge in Seattle in a case brought by a group of Democratic-led states did not represent a judicial overreach that needed to be reined in.
“The district court below concluded that a universal preliminary injunction is necessary to provide the states with complete relief. We conclude that the district court did not abuse its discretion in issuing a universal injunction in order to give the states complete relief,” appeals court Judge Ronald Gould wrote for the majority.
“The states would suffer the same irreparable harms under a geographically-limited injunction as they would without an injunction,” Gould, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, added, explaining that a narrower injunction would require the states that challenged the law to overhaul their eligibility verification systems for various social services programs.
Wednesday’s decision also represents the first time an appeals court has fully concluded that Trump’s order is unconstitutional. The Trump administration has the option of asking the full 9th Circuit to review the case, but it could also appeal the matter straight to the Supreme Court.
“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,” Gould wrote in the ruling, which was joined by appeals court judge Michael Hawkins, also a Clinton appointee.
He went on to say that Trump’s order contradicts the Citizenship Clause of the Constitution, an 1898 Supreme Court case known as United States v. Wong Kim Ark and decades of Executive Branch practice.
Trump’s order is already blocked on a nationwide basis after a federal judge in New Hampshire barred enforcement of it against any babies who would be impacted by the policy in a class-action lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. Such lawsuits are one of the ways the Supreme Court said plaintiffs can still try to broadly block Trump’s order.
Appeals court Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, partially dissented from the court’s ruling on Wednesday. He said he didn’t think the states who challenged Trump’s order had the legal right — known as “standing” — to bring the lawsuit in the first place. As a result, he said, he thought it was “premature to address the merits of the citizenship question or the scope of the injunction.”
US District Judge John Coughenour, a Ronald Reagan appointee in Seattle, was the first federal judge to block Trump’s order. When he first issued an emergency order preventing enforcement of it in late January, he said it was “blatantly unconstitutional.”
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