Tennessee Attorney General backs Trump’s birthright citizenship ban 

State Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is supporting President Donald Trump’s order prohibiting birthright citizenship for children born to immigrants without permanent legal status after Feb. 19.

The attorney general filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court last week in support of Trump’s move to deny citizenship to those children and forbid U.S. agencies from issuing citizenship documents to them. The legal brief says courts that issued national injunctions against the Trump order should instead be confined to specific cases and not allowed to make sweeping orders.

“The American people are the ultimate source of authority and legitimacy for every branch of our government, and every court interpreting the Constitution must therefore adhere to the understanding of the voters who adopted the constitutional language,” Skrmetti said in a statement. “Undermining the sovereignty of the American people through judicial overreach threatens to alienate the people from our constitutional system and thereby cause grievous harm to liberty and public order.”

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court last week to let the birthright citizenship restrictions take partial effect while the matter is in court after district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington blocked his order nationwide. Three federal appeals courts turned down Trump’s requests. 

Skrmetti’s release says the influx of more than 9 million immigrants without permanent legal status in recent years was caused in part by an “expansive interpretation” of the nation’s Citizenship Clause, which is inconsistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868 to deal with citizenship rights and equal protection under the law, mainly for former slaves.