Democrat-Led States Sue Trump on Birthright Citizenship Plan
(Bloomberg) -- Democratic state attorneys general launched their first court fight against the new administration on Tuesday, suing to block President Donald Trump’s bid to end automatic citizenship for children born in the US whose parents are in the country unlawfully or on non-permanent visas.
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The officials filed two lawsuits on Tuesday seeking to strike down the executive order that Trump signed on his first day in office, which is set to take effect Feb. 19. They argue Trump’s action violates the US Constitution and federal immigration policies and is barred by more than a century of court precedent.
“Birthright citizenship is the law of this land,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who is leading a coalition of states and cities that filed one of the new cases, said in an interview. “We cannot just move past how extraordinary and extreme that executive order is.”
Platkin was among the officials from 18 states, San Francisco and Washington, DC, who filed the case in federal court in Boston. Washington State Attorney General Nicholas Brown led a coalition of four other states that filed a similar lawsuit in the Seattle federal court.
Immigrant advocacy groups separately filed a lawsuit Monday night challenging the birthright citizenship executive order. In another case filed in Massachusetts overnight, civil rights attorneys challenged the order on behalf of an unnamed woman that they say is due to have a baby in March who wouldn’t be eligible for citizenship.
Fast Track
The Democratic officials also filed a request asking the Massachusetts court to put the case on a fast track and rule on whether to block enforcement before it takes effect next month.
White House spokesperson Harrison Fields said in a statement in response to the legal challenges that “Radical Leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump to advance his wildly popular agenda. These lawsuits are nothing more than an extension of the Left’s resistance — and the Trump Administration is ready to face them in court.”
Trump’s executive order would take effect 30 days after he signed it. It declares that babies born in the US after that time wouldn’t be recognized by the federal government as citizens if the father isn’t a US citizen or lawful permanent resident and the mother is in the country illegally or has temporary legal status, such as a student, work or tourist visa.
Trump’s order would not only harm children no longer eligible for citizenship and their families, the Democratic lawyers said, but also state governments that get federal money for programs that depend on immigration status, such as Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. They cited a demographics analysis that indicated more than 150,000 children born each year to parents who don’t have legal status would be affected by the order.
“If these American-born children without lawful status remain in the country and themselves have children, those children will inherit their parents’ lack of lawful status. The result will be a multigenerational class of marginalized families, who with each generation grow increasingly disconnected from any country but the United States, yet will remain forever outsiders,” the blue-state attorneys wrote in the Massachusetts case.
Speaking with reporters on Tuesday, Brown said that there are direct financial and legal impacts on Washington State, which influenced his decision to lead one of the cases. He also said the Western District of Washington, which includes the federal court in Seattle, has “a very good set of judges” that has heard similar cases in the past. The executive order’s reading of birthright citizenship is “a fringe theory” rejected by even the most conservative jurists and academics, he said.
14th Amendment
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution — adopted in 1868 after the Civil War to clarify the status of formerly enslaved people — has long been read as giving citizenship to nearly all babies born on US soil. It states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
Trump’s order turns on what it means to be “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Some conservatives have argued this language should be interpreted to exclude people who illegally enter the country. The more common understanding of the phrase has been that even undocumented people are covered since they can be charged with crimes under federal and state laws and pay taxes, for example.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell, who also joined in the latest case, said in a statement that, “Birthright citizenship in our country is a guarantee of equality, born out of a collective fight against oppression, slavery and its devastating harms. It is a settled right in our Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court for more than a century.”
The birthright citizenship action was one of dozens of executive orders and proclamations that Trump signed on his first day in office. His administration is also already facing lawsuits over the government cost-cutting push being led by Elon Musk and efforts to change civil service protections for federal workers.
--With assistance from Josh Wingrove and Anna Edgerton.
(Updates with Washington attorney general in the 11th paragraph.)
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