US appeals court rejects Trump's emergency bid to curtail birthright citizenship

Highlights

• US appeals court rejects request to stay nationwide injunction
• Trump-appointed judge says courts have never recognized an exception to birthright citizenship
• Cases are pending before two other appellate courts

A US appeals court on Wednesday let stand an order blocking President Donald Trump, from curtailing automatic birthright citizenship nationwide as part of the Republican's hardline crackdown on immigration and illegal border crossings.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration's request for an emergency order putting on hold a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Seattle blocking the president's executive order. 

It was the first time an appellate court had weighed in on Trump's executive order on birthright citizenship, whose fate may ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court. Judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire have likewise blocked it, and appeals are underway already in two of those cases.

Trump's order, signed on his first day back in the White House on January 20, directed US agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States after Wednesday if neither their mother nor father was a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.

Trump's US Justice Department had asked the 9th Circuit to by Thursday largely stay a ruling by Seattle-based US District Judge John Coughenour declaring the policy unconstitutional, saying he went too far by issuing a nationwide injunction at the behest of four Democratic-led states.

But a three-judge panel declined to do so and instead set the case down for arguments in June.

US Circuit Judge Danielle Forrest, who Trump appointed during his first term, in a concurring opinion said a rapid ruling would risk eroding public confidence in judges who must "reach their decisions apart from ideology or political preference."

"Nor do the circumstances themselves demonstrate an obvious emergency where it appears that the exception to birthright citizenship urged by the Government has never been recognized by the judiciary," she wrote.

The other judges on the panel included US Circuit Judge William Canby, an appointee of Democratic former President Jimmy Carter, and US Circuit Judge Milan Smith, an appointee of Republican former President George W. Bush.

The White House and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Democratic state attorneys general, immigrant rights advocates and others have filed a series of lawsuits alleging that Trump's executive order violates the citizenship clause of the US Constitution's 14th Amendment, which has long been understood to recognize that virtually anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

They say the US Supreme Court clearly ruled in 1898 in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment guarantees the right to birthright citizenship regardless of a child's parents' immigration status.

Coughenour, an appointee of Republican former President Ronald Reagan, was the first judge to block the order, which he did by issuing a temporary restraining order on January 23. He later extended that into an indefinite preliminary injunction.

Coughenour's decision came in a lawsuit by the Democratic-led states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon and several pregnant women. He has called Trump's order "blatantly unconstitutional."

During a February 6 hearing, the judge said Trump's administration had sought to deprive children born on US soil of their fundamental right to citizenship by cloaking what was effectively a constitutional amendment in an executive order.

If allowed to stand, Trump's order would for the first time deny more than 150,000 children born annually in the United States the right to citizenship, the state attorneys general say.