(Adnkronos) – Donald Trump risks a new clash with the Supreme Court over his attempt to abolish birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors to the United States. The controversial case will be discussed Wednesday before the Supreme Court, but several judges from the conservative majority appear skeptical about challenging the 14th Amendment, which since 1868 has guaranteed ‘birthright citizenship’, the citizenship by right of birth on which America’s history as a land of immigrants has been founded.
Trump, in short, feels headed for a possible new defeat, after the Supreme Court, with the decisive vote of three conservative judges, including Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch appointed by him, declared the global tariffs he imposed last year illegal. In recent days, the president has again attacked the judges who ruled against him on tariffs: ‘they make me sick, because they are bad for the country,’ he said and predicted that the Court “will find a way to reach a wrong conclusion” on birthright citizenship as well.
The fact is that the issue comes before the Supreme Court after at least six lower courts, with judges of different ideological leanings, have deemed completely illegal the executive order signed by Trump on the first day of his term, with which the American government claims not to recognize the citizenship of children of non-American or legally resident parents.
“I cannot recall a case as clear as this: this is a blatantly unconstitutional order,” declared John Coughernour, a Seattle judge appointed by Ronald Reagan who blocked the measure last year.
Not to mention that to support Trump’s order on Wednesday before the high court, State Attorney John Sauer will invoke interpretations of the 14th Amendment considered marginal by legal scholars, citing legal precedents where the concept that “anyone born on American territory is automatically an American citizen” has been rejected. An exercise that for many legal scholars, even conservatives, is merely a distortion of the amendment through “a clever pastiche of misleading, misinterpreted, and atypical fragments,” as Yale professor Akhil Amar told the Wall Street Journal.
