Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill
BATON ROUGE – Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has joined a coalition of 24 state AGs in support of President Donald Trump’s birthright citizenship policy.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order to stop birthright citizenship for illegal immigrants and birth tourists. Three district court judges issued opinions against Trumps’ policy. But in June, the U.S. Supreme Court confirmed the district courts had overstepped and allowed the order to go into effect.
But the lower courts now have entered new orders trying to stop the executive order from going into effect. So Trump is asking the Supreme Court to decide whether the executive order is constitutional.
In the brief, the attorneys general say the Fourteenth Amendment never intended to grant automatic citizenship to tourists or illegal aliens who are coming into our country for the sole purpose of having an “anchor baby.”
“We filed a lawsuit on this same issue which has currently been temporarily stayed pending the outcome of other litigation on this issue,” Murrill said. “We’re happy to see this lawsuit move forward. I believe the United States Supreme Court needs to expeditiously resolve this issue.”
Tennessee AG Jonathan Skrmetti is co-leading the coalition with Iowa AG Brenna Bird.
“The idea that citizenship is guaranteed to everyone born in the United States doesn’t square with the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment or the way many government officials and legal analysts understood the law when it was adopted after the Civil War,” Skrmetti said. “If you look at the law at the time, citizenship attached to kids whose parents were lawfully in the country.
“Each child born in this country is precious no matter their parents’ immigration status, but not every child is entitled to American citizenship. This case could allow the Supreme Court to resolve a constitutional question with far-reaching implications for the States and our nation.”
In the brief, the AGs lay out historical evidence from the 1860s through the early 1900s that supports this interpretation. Congressional debates, executive branch practice, and legal commentary from the Reconstruction Era consistently emphasized that citizenship required parental domicile and allegiance to the United States, not temporary or unlawful presence.
The brief recognizes that many people now cite the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark for the proposition that the Citizenship Clause guarantees birthright citizenship even to children born here to transient or illegally-present parents. But as the brief notes, the parents in that case were lawfully present and permanently domiciled in the United States.
Louisiana joined the Tennessee and Iowa co-led brief along with the AGs from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Georgia, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
