A federal appeals court ruled against President Trump on Friday, barring the administration from ending birthright citizenship.
The three-judge panel on the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court injunction that barred the administration from enacting a January executive order, signed by the president, that would curtail birthright citizenship.
“The ‘lessons of history’ thus give us every reason to be wary of now blessing this most recent effort to break with our established tradition of recognizing birthright citizenship and to make citizenship depend on the actions of one’s parents rather than — in all but the rarest of circumstances — the simple fact of being born in the United States,” the court wrote in the 100-page ruling.
The federal appeals court in Boston became the latest court to say that the president’s push to end birthright citizenship, which states that anyone born in the U.S. are citizens regardless of their parents’ immigration status, is likely unlawful.
“Our nation’s history of efforts to restrict birthright citizenship — from Dred Scott in the decade before the Civil War to the attempted justification for the enforcement of the Chinese Exclusion Act in Wong Kim Ark — has not been a proud one,” the court’s top judge wrote in the ruling.