The next legal step after the Supreme Court appeared to roll over multiple times to the will of President Trump this term will be answering the question of whether his executive order barring birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants is unconstitutional.

That ruling is likely to come in the court's next term, now that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against the administration, finding that, yes, the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

In the 2-1 ruling by a three-judge panel, the appeals court finds that there is significant precedent for opening birthright citizenship to immigrants, specifically starting with an 1898 Supreme Court case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a case involving a San Francisco man who was initially denied entry back into the US after leaving, despite having been born in San Francisco in 1873.

At the time, under the racist Chinese Exclusion Act, Chinese laborers were denied the ability to become US citizens, and if they returned to China and tried to come back to the US, they were denied reentry. The Fourteenth Amendment had been intended to settle the question of whether slaves or their children could be citizens, and the high court found that it extended to the children of immigrant non-citizens as well.

"Since Wong Kim Ark was decided in 1898, and until this challenged Executive Order, the Judiciary, Congress, and the Executive Branch have consistently and uniformly protected the Citizenship Clause’s explicit guarantee of birthright citizenship regardless of the immigration status of an individual’s parents," writes Judge Ronald M. Gould for the majority.

Gould, an appointee of President Bill Clinton, was joined in the opinion by Judge Michael Daly Hawkins, another Clinton appointee. A partial dissent was filed by Trump appointee Judge Patrick J. Bumatay on the grounds of standing.

The majority opinion finds that the states that sued the administration in this case, Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon, have standing because of the economic harms that would be caused by denying citizenship to those born in those states, who then count toward federal appropriations based on census data. Judge Bumatay dissented only on the question of standing, calling these harms "speculative," but did not dissent on the larger constitutional question.

The original case was brought before a federal judge in Washington, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington, and the Ninth Circuit found that this allows them to uphold his nationwide injunction blocking Trump's executive order. This is despite the Supreme Court ruling in June that federal judges should not wield the power of these universal injunctions, and that individual plaintiffs must bring suit against executive orders like this or join a class action. As the New York Times notes, the Supreme Court decision "left the door slightly open to universal injunctions when they were the only way to address the claim brought by the parties who sued, and the appellate judges found that this was such a case."

The Ninth Circuit panel dismissed the claims brought by a group of pregnant mothers, saying that their case would be covered under a different jurisdiction, a federal court in New Hampshire, where a class-action suit is being heard on behalf of undocumented mothers.

Top image: The William Kenzo Nakamura Courthouse in Seattle, where the Seattle arm of the Ninth Circuit resides. Photo via Wikimedia