Federal appeals court upholds decision that Trump’s view on birthright citizenship is likely unconstitutional

Washington — A federal appeals court on Friday upheld a lower court’s decision to block the Trump administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship as likely unconstitutional, the latest court to do so. 

In a 100-page ruling, the First Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction of a district court in Boston and ruled in favor of plaintiff states and against the Trump administration and an executive order the president signed his first week in office to end birthright citizenship. 

Other cases challenging the president’s effort to end birthright citizenship have been making their way through the courts, and they haven’t been decided in the president’s favor. 

“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 chief justice wrote. “Indeed, those efforts each have been rejected, once by the people through constitutional amendment in 1868 and once by the court relying on the same amendment three decades later, and at a time when tensions over immigration were also high.”

“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 Thea 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 appeals court concluded. 

CBS News has reached out to the White House for comment on the ruling.   

The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to review the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order in two different cases, one brought by four states and the second by parents whose children would be impacted by the policy.

Melissa Quinn

contributed to this report.