Trump Fumed About Supreme Court’s Birthright Citizenship Ruling, But He Appears to Have Missed Deadline to Appeal

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

President Donald Trump fumed about a recent Supreme Court ruling in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, but it looks like he let the deadline expire without filing an appeal.

The legal issue was one of Trump’s executive orders from the first day of his second term that purported to end birthright citizenship for children of illegal immigrants or those who were in the country temporarily.

Like many of his executive orders, this one was met with lawsuits, and in June, in the case of Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court held that the executive order violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s language, which did grant citizenship to those “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

On Wednesday, the president complained about the Trump v. Barbara ruling and an earlier Supreme Court opinion knocking down his sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs.

“Does anybody have any idea how much Money and Prestige the United States Supreme Court has cost our Nation with their negative Rulings on Birthright Citizenship and TARIFFS?” the president asked in a Truth Social post shortly after 6 p.m. ET. “The answer, TRILLIONS AND TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS!”

Trump’s declarations that the court rulings cost the U.S. “prestige” and “trillions” of dollars are, like many of his claims, unverified, but also implausible.

It’s tough to argue the U.S. loses prestige for continuing to do something (grant birthright citizenship) it has done for over a century-and-a-half — and many other countries do as well. The president has falsely claimed that the United States is the only country to grant birthright citizenship.

CNN fact checker Daniel Dale has debunked this repeatedly, noting “[a]bout three dozen countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including Canada, Mexico, and the majority of South American countries.”

And even illegal immigrants pay billions of dollars in taxes every year at the federal, state, and local levels; Americans who are citizens since birth will pay a large variety of taxes over the course of their lifetimes.

The veracity of Trump’s social media rants aside, if the president is angry that the Supreme Court has ruled against him, he had the option to file a request for the nation’s highest court to reconsider its decision.

Except, as Politico senior legal affairs reporter Josh Gerstein pointed out, the deadline to do so expired on Monday.

The Supreme Court opinion in Trump v. Barbara was released on June 30, and the court’s procedural rules set the deadline for filing a rehearing petition at 25 days from the date of the challenged decision.

“That period would have ended Monday, since such deadlines don’t expire on weekends,” wrote Gerstein. “However, there is no indication of such a filing on the Supreme Court’s docket for the case.”

The last entry on the docket is the court’s June 30 ruling; nothing has been filed by any party since then.

Gerstein made “repeated requests for comment” to spokespeople at the White House and Department of Justice, but received no response, he wrote.

Even if Trump had filed something by Monday’s deadline, it seems highly unlikely to have changed the result. Getting a rehearing petition granted is “extraordinarily rare,” wrote Gerstein, only a “smattering” are filed every year, and “typically seek to challenge the court’s decision not to take up a particular case,” not overturn an argued case.

Petitioners also have to convince a majority of the court to agree to rehear the case, Gerstein noted. In Trump v. Barbara, the court decided 6-3 to toss out Trump’s executive order. Five of the justices reached that ruling through the Fourteenth Amendment.

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