As the country waits for a decision from the US Supreme Court, Constitutional law experts and immigration attorneys are preparing for different outcomes regarding the issues of nationwide injunctions and, potentially, birthright citizenship.
This week the high court was asked to weigh arguments whether a single federal court judge could issue a nationwide injunction. While President Trump’s administration was not asking SCOTUS to specifically decide the issue of birthright citizenship at this time, the argument is should the president’s executive order be allowed to go into partial effect.
President Trump signed the Protecting the Value and Meaning of American Citizenship executive order on Jan. 20. Several lawsuits filed in federal court have blocked the order from taking effect.
“People have been criticizing national injunctions for more than a decade, and it’s not entirely clear that courts can do this,” said South Texas College of Law professor, Josh Blackman. “National injunctions became very common during the second half of the Obama administration, and then the first Trump administration became more common, and then during the Biden administration became more common, and now in the first few months of Trump, we’ve had dozens of national junctions.”
Blackman, a constitutional law expert, said the main dilemma is if SCOTUS sides with President Trump on the issue of nationwide injunctions, then his executive order on birthright citizenship would create a situation where it is in effect in some states, while not in others.
“The actual idea that a child born in New York will be a citizen and a child born in Texas would not be, I think they can’t quite come to terms with that,” said Blackman.
Houston immigration attorneys are telling clients who are pregnant, they are going to have wait for the Supreme Court’s ruling to determine their course of action.
“We have clients that are pregnant right now in the midst of all this,” said immigration attorney Raed Gonzalez.
Gonzalez said it’s not clear how he would advise clients to proceed even if SCOTUS rules in favor of President Trump.
“There’s going to be a a lot other lawsuits in the court. We don’t know if they are going to have to be individual. We don’t know if there’s a class action lawsuit. We don’t know if the court can say, ‘oh, this is going to be determined on a case-by-case basis,’” said Gonzalez.
