Judge blocks Trump’s new bid to curb birthright citizenship

WASHINGTON: A federal judge has blocked President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to limit birthright citizenship, granting a preliminary injunction against an executive order that the administration said would target “birth tourism”.

US District Judge Deborah L Boardman in Maryland on Wednesday issued the injunction until a class-action lawsuit brought by immigrant families and advocacy groups is resolved.

“The Supreme Court has spoken: Children in the certified class are citizens at birth,” Boardman, appointed by President Joe Biden, wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.

Birthright citizenship is guaranteed under current law for anyone who is born on US soil, with a few exceptions. The law stretches back to 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War.

But Trump has long wanted to end birthright citizenship, issuing a previous executive order declaring that children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens. The Supreme Court struck down that attempt in June.

In August, the president tried again with a narrowed executive order that appeared to restrict automatic citizenship for specific categories of people, including children born to adults with connections to foreign embassies or organisations or to anyone considered an “alien enemy” of the United States.

The order defined birth tourism as someone who enters the United States on a “non-immigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”. Birth tourism is already considered fraud and grounds to restrict a visa if someone seeks one specifically to obtain US citizenship for a child.

The order sought to deny citizenship to children born to adults who “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship”, and some families said they feared their children could be denied citizenship simply because they purchased airfare to come to the US and got pregnant after they arrived.

Families and organisations who sued over the birthright citizenship restrictions told the court that the executive branch has taken a broad view of who qualifies as an alien enemy, sometimes relying on speculation or misinformation to make that determination.

Others said they feared their children would be denied citizenship because a member of the parents’ extended family was connected to a gang in their home country, even though the parents were not gang members.