Court hands Trump third appellate loss in birthright citizenship battle

By Nate Raymond

March 11 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump suffered another legal defeat on Tuesday in his effort to curtail automatic birthright citizenship nationwide, as a third federal appeals court refused to lift one of the court orders blocking the Republican's executive order.

The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the Trump administration's request to pause a nationwide injunction issued by a federal judge in Massachusetts at the urging of immigrant rights groups and Democratic attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia.

It marked the third time in a row that a federal appeals court has refused to lift one of the four injunctions issued nationally so far blocking Trump's order, which judges have consistently concluded is unconstitutional.

Both the Richmond-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in recent weeks have rejected the administration's requests to pause nationwide injunctions in litigation that is expected to eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Trump's order, which he signed on his first day back in office on January 20, directed U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States if neither their mother nor father is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

That order was to apply to children born after February 19, but implementation has been repeatedly blocked by judges at the urging of immigrant rights groups and Democratic state attorneys general.

The two lawsuits before the 1st Circuit were filed in Boston by the Democratic state attorneys general, the city of San Francisco, immigrant advocacy organizations La Colaborativa and the Brazilian Worker Center, and a pregnant immigrant.

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.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, in their cases concluded Trump's order violated a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment that guarantees that virtually anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

He cited the U.S. Supreme Court's 1898 ruling in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark holding that the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause guarantees the right to birthright citizenship regardless of a child's parent's immigration status.

Chief U.S. Circuit Judge David Barron, writing for the three-judge 1st Circuit panel, on Tuesday said the Trump administration had declined to advance "any developed argument" demonstrating the executive order was in fact constitutional.

"Nor does the Government contest that, for more than a century, persons in the two categories that the Executive Order seeks to prevent from being recognized as United States citizens have been so recognized," he said.

Instead, Barron said the Trump administration wanted to "disrupt longstanding governmental practices" and have Sorokin's injunction put on hold on the grounds that the Democratic-led states that had sued lacked legal standing.

Yet Barron, who like the other panel members was appointed by a Democratic president, said the Trump administration failed to show the states had not sufficiently alleged they would be injured by Trump's order due to a loss of federal funds to administer programs that would be used by newly-born citizens.

The case is State of New Jersey v. Trump, 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal, No. 25-1170.

For the states: Shankar Duraiswamy of the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General

For the private plaintiffs: Oren Sellstrom of Lawyers for Civil Rights

For the U.S.: Derek Weiss of the U.S. Department of Justice

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