Overview
- Federal judges have kept the executive order on hold, with a Reagan-appointed district judge calling the policy “blatantly unconstitutional” and multiple courts agreeing with that view.
- State attorneys general led by Democrats, including Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell, won injunctions that paused the order even after the Supreme Court narrowed nationwide injunctions.
- SCOTUSblog published a detailed critique of attorney Pete Patterson’s pro-order arguments, saying he ignored a key federal statute that grants citizenship to anyone born in the United States and sidestepped text that focuses on the child rather than the parents.
- Historians and legal scholars filed friend-of-the-court briefs describing the push to end birthright citizenship as unprecedented in U.S. history, citing the Know Nothings and a failed World War II effort to strip U.S.-born Japanese Americans of citizenship.
- The fight turns on how to read the Fourteenth Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” with scholars like Akhil Reed Amar arguing it means born on U.S. soil and under the U.S. flag, while some Republican officials, including Tennessee’s AG, back a narrower view that could leave some U.S.-born children stateless.