(NewsNation) — Attorneys general from four states, led by Washington state, submitted a document to Supreme Court justices, urging them to follow the Constitution’s directive on birthright citizenship and not the president’s.
President Trump signed an executive order on day one of his presidency ending birthright citizenship, nullifying part of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Birthright citizenship grants automatic citizenship to anyone born in the United States. Children of undocumented immigrants born on U.S. soil are legal citizens, per the 14th Amendment.
But Trump is seeking to reverse the right as the case awaits a decision from the Supreme Court following previous lower courts blocking the president’s order.
Does Trump’s birthright citizenship order create a ‘birth tax’?
“Being directed to follow the law as it has been universally understood for over 125 years is not an emergency warranting the extraordinary remedy of a stay,” Attorneys General Nicholas Brown of Washington, Kris Mayes of Arizona, Kwame Raoul of Illinois and Dan Rayfield of Oregon wrote on April 4.
Birthright citizenship “is beyond the President’s power to destroy,” they wrote in the 40-page response to Trump’s request for a partial stay.
A partial stay is an order that suspends or halts part of a lower court’s order.
In an April 7 response to the court, U.S. Solicitor General Dean John Sauer, representing Trump, argues that being born on U.S. soil does not equate to citizenship.
“Respondents argue that ‘birth on our soil,’ by itself, confers citizenship. But the text of the Citizenship
Clause extends citizenship only to ‘persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,'” the document said. “Respondents’ birth-only reading effectively erases the phrase ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.'”
The Supreme Court has yet to issue a final ruling.
