Birthright citizenship decision gives advocates short-lived sigh of relief
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Immigration advocates are celebrating the Supreme Court's decision to uphold birthright citizenship as a win for children, families and the Constitution.
- But the decision was largely anticipated — and it's just one of a growing wave of worries over policies involving citizenship and immigration.
The big picture: Legal disputes remain over the Trump administration's speedy deportation campaign, a ramped-up effort to revoke citizenship and recent Supreme Court decisions that undercut immigration protections.
- "We need to keep fighting," says Efrén Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center.
Driving the news: "Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the five-justice majority.
Yes, but: Even with birthright citizenship intact, the federal government can still erect barriers to the rights that come with it, Robert Chang, executive director of the UC Irvine Law School's Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality, says.
- "In any instance where citizenship is a requirement, the federal government has so many levers to push," he says, like raising the bar to prove citizenship or immigration status.
Between the lines: Advocates and analysts see the administration shifting its strategy away from the highly confrontational spectacle of the Kristi Noem-Greg Bovino era toward quieter changes.
- One example is the Trump administration's plan to file at least 250 denaturalization cases by October, which the DOJ confirmed to Axios via email.
- Todd Schulte, the president of immigration and criminal justice advocacy group FWD.us, says it's "an all-of-government approach ... instead of highly visible jump-out stuff we saw in the federalized deployments."
Zoom out: Without much fanfare, the administration has recipients of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, or Dreamers, holding their breath as status renewals are slow-walked.
- Immigration hardliners believe the administration is quietly ending DACA while attempting to avoid political fallout, Axios' Brittany Gibson reports.
And while Tuesday's decision is a win for immigration advocates, it comes just days after the Supreme Court cleared the path for the administration to reject asylum-seekers who haven't yet crossed the southern border and end humanitarian protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals.
- The 6-3 decision that the Temporary Protected Status program is largely shielded from judicial review has ramifications for hundreds of thousands living and working in the U.S., many of whom already had their protections under threat.
- "People end up in this twilight zone where they're here, they're in jeopardy, they lose work authorizations," Chang says, noting the vast resources that would be needed to actually conduct mass deportations.
The bottom line: The high court's record on immigration is far from set, with other major immigration policy debates — like those over fast-tracked deportations and mandatory detention — working through the courts.
Go deeper: Scoop: Trump escalates citizenship crackdown
