By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
President Trump signed two executive orders Thursday aimed at limiting birthright citizenship, roughly a month after the Supreme Court struck down his original, broader attempt to end the practice by executive fiat.
The president called that earlier ruling "very unfair" and said the new orders represent an effort to reach the same end through a different route, according to the Los Angeles Times. Details of exactly how the new orders differ from the version the justices rejected were still being parsed Thursday; CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levinson was among those examining the language for reporters, alongside separate CBS News analysis on the orders' path through the courts.
Birthright citizenship — the constitutional guarantee, rooted in the 14th Amendment, that children born on U.S. soil are citizens regardless of their parents' immigration status — has been a Trump administration target since his first days back in office. The Supreme Court's June ruling did not resolve the underlying constitutional question so much as reject the administration's initial mechanism for enforcing a ban nationwide.
Whether the new orders survive the near-certain legal challenges is, at this point, an open question the courts alone can answer. [Editor's note: The precise legal theory underlying the new orders and the timeline for expected litigation were not detailed in the available reporting and should be confirmed before further coverage.]
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by the Los Angeles Times and CBS News.
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