By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A U.S. 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 U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration request to pause the lower-court judge’s 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 U.S. Supreme Court.
Trump’s Justice Department had asked the appellate court to issued an emergency stay that would largely pause that decision while it pursued an appeal, saying Seattle-based U.S. District Judge John Coughenour went too far by issuing a nationwide injunction at the behest of four Democratic-led states.
The executive order remains separately blocked by judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The Justice Department is pursuing appeals in the Maryland and Massachusetts cases as well.
Trump’s order, signed on his first day back in the White House on January 20, directed U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States after Tuesday if neither their mother nor father is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
Lawsuits were quickly filed by Democratic state attorneys general, immigrant rights advocates and others, who argued the order violated the citizenship clause of the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 parent’s 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.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Christopher Cushing and Stephen Coates)
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