What to Know About the Court Cases Challenging Trump’s Immigration Agenda

A number of major cases challenging President Trump’s initial moves on immigration are making their way through the legal system.

Mr. Trump has moved aggressively to detain and deport migrants, but a series of his moves have been challenged in court. In a number of those cases, federal judges have responded by ordering the Trump administration to give due process to people being deported. The administration has dragged its feet to avoid some of those rulings, setting up a potential constitutional clash between the executive and judiciary branches.

Here’s a look at where some of the biggest cases stand, and what comes next.

Birthright Citizenship

Where It Stands

On his first day back in office, Mr. Trump issued an executive order ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and foreign residents. Birthright citizenship, the guarantee that a person born in the United States is automatically a citizen, has long been considered a central tenet of the United States.

The 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War, declares that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” The Supreme Court affirmed the guarantee of automatic citizenship for nearly all children born in the United States in 1898 in the case of Wong Kim Ark, where the justices found that under the 14th Amendment, Mr. Wong, who was born in 1873 to Chinese parents living in San Francisco, was a U.S. citizen.

The order prompted a flurry of lawsuits, including challenges by Democratic attorneys general and civil rights groups. Federal courts in Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington State issued temporary directives that paused the order for the entire country while court challenges continued. One federal judge called the order “blatantly unconstitutional.”

What Comes Next

The Trump administration pushed back against the nationwide pause on the policy, filing an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court. The administration asked the court to lift the pause and allow the policy to go into effect in states that had not challenged it.