22 States file a lawsuit to stop Trump’s order blocking birthright citizenship | Immigration in the United States
The judicial war has not been long in coming in Donald Trump’s second term. This Tuesday, just hours after the new president signed the decree amid an avalanche of executive orders, 22 States have filed a pair of lawsuits to stop the one that blocks citizenship by birth. The policy, which has more than a century of precedent, guarantees that babies born in the United States are American citizens regardless of the immigration status of their parents, whether they are undocumented migrants, students with a visa or even tourists. Getting rid of legal precedent, expressly supported by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, was a Republican promise and he has fulfilled it on day one.
Trump’s executive order, about 700 words long, declares that children born in the United States to foreign parents will no longer be considered citizens. The argument is that since the children of non-citizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the country, they are not protected by the Constitution. Likewise, the order questions that the 14th Amendment, which is considered one of the most important and the one that ended slavery after the Civil War, automatically grants citizenship to any person born in the United States. “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside,” says the amendment in question.
Specifically, Trump’s order excludes the following groups from automatic citizenship: people whose mothers are not legally in the United States and whose fathers are not U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, and people whose mothers are in the country legally but temporarily and whose parents are not citizens or legal permanent residents. In addition, it prohibits federal agencies from recognizing the citizenship of people included in those categories. It will come into effect in 30 days, on February 19.
Given this, 18 States along with the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco have appealed the decree in federal court. They call Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship “extraordinary and extreme,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin, who led the effort. “Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king. “You cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of a pen,” he added. In addition to New Jersey and the two cities, California, Massachusetts, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin joined the lawsuit to stop the order. Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington filed a separate lawsuit in federal court.
Connecticut Attorney General William Tong, a birthright U.S. citizen and the country’s first elected Chinese-American attorney general, said the lawsuit was personal for him. “The 14th Amendment says what it means, and it means what it says: If you are born on American soil, you are an American. And that’s it,” he said. “There is no legitimate legal debate on this issue. But the fact that Trump is dead wrong won’t stop him from inflicting serious harm right now on American families like mine.”
In addition to the attorneys general, several pro-immigrant groups have also taken action. Just hours after Trump signed the executive order, for example, chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts, along with other immigrant rights advocates, filed a lawsuit with the New Hampshire federal court. The lawsuit asks the court to declare the order unconstitutional. “Stripping children of the ‘incalculable treasure’ of citizenship is a grave harm,” the lawsuit says. “It denies them the full membership in American society to which they are entitled.”
