U.S. Supreme Court Rules Birthright Citizenship Ban Unconstitutional; Trump Says Congress Could Limit It Through Legislation

[Financial News]  

On June 30 local time, SCOTUS blocked efforts to restrict birthright citizenship. The court ruled that President Donald Trump's executive order, which sought to deny U.S. citizenship to children born to undocumented immigrants or foreign nationals staying in the country temporarily, was unconstitutional.
The ruling placed a check on part of Trump's hard-line anti-immigration agenda.
However, in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, Trump said that the court's decision to keep the birthright citizenship system was "a great misfortune for our country" and argued that Congress could work around it through legislation instead of amending the Constitution.

According to AP and other foreign media, the Supreme Court ruled that restrictions on birthright citizenship, which automatically grants citizenship to children born in the United States, were unconstitutional. The vote was 6-3.
On the final day of its term, the court, which had often handed Trump favorable rulings and bolstered broad presidential authority, dealt him a setback.
Chief Justice John Roberts reaffirmed the principle of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the majority opinion.
Roberts said citizenship is "the right to have rights, the right to freely participate in our political community." He added that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to "all persons born in this land."

By contrast, Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a dissenting opinion that the Fourteenth Amendment was "designed to secure equal rights for freed Black people" and that birthright citizenship should be applied only in limited cases. That is also Trump's position.
Although the court has a conservative majority, with three liberal justices and six conservatives, the birthright citizenship ruling stood after three conservative justices joined the majority.
The three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, along with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, upheld birthright citizenship.
Justices Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh joined the majority because of existing federal law granting citizenship to those children, but he did not find Trump's executive order unconstitutional.
Earlier, on his first day in office on January 20 last year, Trump signed an executive order banning birthright citizenship for children born to parents who were in the United States illegally or only temporarily.
That meant children born to parents staying temporarily on student, work, or tourist visas would also be denied citizenship.
In response, 22 states led by Democratic governors and Washington, D.C., filed lawsuits claiming the order was unconstitutional.
Both the trial court and the appellate court ruled the order unconstitutional and issued injunctions suspending its effect, so the birthright citizenship ban had not taken effect.

Despite the Supreme Court ruling, Trump insisted that birthright citizenship could still be restricted.
He said it could "easily be fixed with presidential support" and that "a long and cumbersome constitutional amendment is unnecessary." Trump added that "Congress should begin today to work on ending the costly and unfair birthright citizenship system," stressing that it would receive his "full and total support."
He is calling on Congress to pass legislation that would effectively limit birthright citizenship without amending the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
According to the conservative outlet Just the News, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Representative Brian Babin of Texas, and others have introduced bills to abolish or sharply limit automatic citizenship by birth.

Meanwhile, in another ruling on the same day, the Supreme Court upheld laws in nearly half of U.S. states that bar transgender women who transitioned from male to female from competing on public school and college sports teams. It also ruled unconstitutional a law that imposed spending limits on political parties in federal elections.
The court had already handed Trump a major victory on the 29th by allowing the president to dismiss the heads of independent federal agencies at will. However, it made an exception for Federal Reserve Board member Lisa Cook, whose case is still pending.
[email protected] Song Kyung-jae Reporter