President Donald Trump speaks with reporters in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
A panel of three federal appeals court judges in Massachusetts have declined to grant Donald Trump’s request to undo the pause previously placed on enforcing the president’s executive order revoking birthright citizenship.
As Law&Crime has previously reported, U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin last month joined several other federal judges — appointed by presidents from both sides of the political aisle — who have issued nationwide preliminary injunctions on the controversial measure that would potentially upend more than a century of legal precedent. In a subsequent three-page order, Sorokin declined to stay his injunction. Lawyers for Trump sought a stay of the injunction pending appeal, arguing that since citizenship is “an individual right,” states have “no ability to assert” individual-rights claims of citizenship of their residents against the federal government.
On Tuesday, three circuit judges for the First U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that Trump’s arguments didn’t hold up, and declined to stay Sorokin’s order.
The unanimous ruling by Chief Circuit Judge for the First Circuit David J. Barron, appointed by Barack Obama, as well as Joe Biden appointees Julie Rikelman and Seth Aframe, systematically dismantled each of the arguments from Trump’s lawyers, including their challenge to the procedural issue of standing.
“The Government expressly declines to make any developed argument that it is likely to succeed on appeal in showing that the Executive Order is either constitutional or compliant with [federal law],” the judges write. “Nor does the Government contest that, for more than a century, persons in the two categories that the Executive Order seeks to prevent from being recognized as United States citizens have been so recognized.”
Instead, the judges note, the defense team “contends that it can make the requisite showing for a stay of the preliminary injunction even without developing an argument to us that the Executive Order is lawful and even though the enforcement of the Executive Order would dramatically break with the Executive Branch’s longstanding legal position and thereby disrupt longstanding governmental practices.”
The government contended that it made a “strong showing” that the plaintiff states likely lack standing to sue — but the judges didn’t agree.
“[W]e conclude that, at least given its arguments in its stay motion, the Government has not made a ‘strong showing’ to undermine the Plaintiff-States’ standing,” the ruling says. “We further conclude that it has not met its burden as to the other [required] factors.”
The judges also found that Trump would likely not succeed on the merits.
“[T]he Government has not made any developed argument in support of its stay motion that it is likely to succeed in showing that the Executive Order is lawful,” the ruling says.
At the time Sorokin declined to stay his injunction, he wrote that his decision was “not a close case,” reasoning that his analysis of the arguments presented on behalf of the plaintiffs — a coalition of Democratic states as well as Washington, D.C. — and those put forth by the Trump administration weighed heavily in favor of the plaintiffs.
“The equitable scale did not tip ever so slightly in the plaintiffs’ direction; the four factors favor the plaintiffs lopsidedly,” Sorokin wrote at the time. “That was so in the preliminary-injunction analysis, where the plaintiffs bore a high burden of persuasion and decisively satisfied it. If the defendants could not succeed in that context, then they certainly cannot prevail now. On the present motion, the burden shifts to the defendants to establish entitlement to the extraordinary relief they seek, and they have endeavored to meet it primarily by repastinating the same facts and legal theories the Court has already considered and rejected.”
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Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
