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A three-judge panel of the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has agreed with a lower court’s ruling that President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to redefine birthright citizenship is unconstitutional.
The executive order, signed by Trump in his first week in office, is “invalid,” the majority opinion of the court explained in its ruling, “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.'”
The lawsuit was originally brought before a district court in Washington State by the attorneys general of Washington, Oregon, Arizona and Illinois. The class-action lawsuit may fit into the parameters established by the Supreme Court last month for how a district court can issue injunctions across the entirety of the country.
The 2-1 decision by the Ninth Circuit Court panel affirms what that lower court concluded — that the president cannot unilaterally change the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause.
That portion of the amendment reads:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.
Trump’s order sought to define the term “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” differently, by claiming it applies only to children born in the United States who have at least one parent with citizenship. That interpretation has not been enforced for over 125 years, when the Supreme Court ruled that all children born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ citizenship status, are citizens.
In addition to noting that precedent, which has been upheld in numerous cases since it was established, the court panel on Wednesday noted that the Trump administration’s redefining of the term contradicted its “ordinary meaning” at the time it was adopted. The court states in its opinion:
When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted, as it is today, ‘jurisdiction’ was commonly used in reference to the power of the courts. But in reference to nations, ‘jurisdiction’ was also defined as the ‘[p]ower of governing or legislating; the right of making or enforcing laws; the power or right of exercising authority;’ … Defendants [the Trump administration] point to no contrary dictionary definitions that define jurisdiction in terms of allegiance and protection. Indeed, they make no arguments about the ordinary meaning of the Citizenship Clause at all.
“The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional,” the appellate court said. “We fully agree.”
After Trump issued his executive order in January, several district courts ruled in favor of similar arguments that it was clearly unconstitutional. The administration brought those cases to the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in June, ruled that individual district courts cannot issue nationwide injunctions without certain conditions being met. The high court did not rule on whether Trump’s executive order was constitutional.
The ruling left open the possibility that lower courts could rule in more narrow ways, focusing on the aggrieved parties before them, while the administration could attempt to implement the order elsewhere, critics pointed out.
The Supreme Court suggested that lower-courts can issue nationwide injunctions through class-action lawsuits, possibly across multiple jurisdictional lines. In addition to a Washington State-based ruling on the matter, a federal district court in New Hampshire has placed a nationwide injunction on the executive order, based on a class-action suit filed in the state. Unlike the Washington State case, the New Hampshire case hasn’t yet reached the appellate court level.
The state attorneys general involved in the Washington case praised the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling.
“The court agrees that the president cannot redefine what it means to be American with the stroke of a pen. He cannot strip away the rights, liberties, and protections of children born in our country,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a post on X.
Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, perhaps anticipating that the Trump administration will likely bring this case to the Supreme Court, too, promised to continue working to protect the rights of those who gained citizenship through 14th Amendment protections.
“We will keep fighting to protect the Constitution and the rule of law,” Mayes wrote.
Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul also commented on the ruling, writing in a statement that “No president can arbitrarily pick and choose which children born in the United States are allowed to be citizens of this country.”
“Birthright citizenship has been enshrined in our Constitution in unambiguous language for more than 150 years, and no president has the authority to override the Constitution,” Raoul added.
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