A coalition of 18 Democratic-led states, along with the District of Columbia and the city of San Francisco, sued Tuesday to block President Donald Trump’s attack on the long-established principle of birthright citizenship.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, is the second major legal challenge to Trump’s attempt to stop the country’s automatic recognition of citizenship for the U.S.-born children of non-citizens. Immigrant rights advocates filed a separate lawsuit in the U.S. District of New Hampshire Monday night.
“When we say we’ll defend the rule of law, we mean it,” New Jersey Attorney Gen. Matt Platkin said in a video posted to social media, in which he railed against the “unlawful order [Trump] signed yesterday that rewrote the Constitution, upended centuries of precedent and denied residents of our state and across this country the right that they have in the Constitution to birthright citizenship.”
Both lawsuits allege that Trump’s executive order flatly violates the 14th Amendment, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside.”
Overturning the 14th Amendment’s guarantees through an executive order threatens to deprive children of migrants of a fundamental right, the lawsuit says, and may leave some stateless. Trump’s order would impact approximately 150,000 children per year, according to estimates cited in the complaint.
The U.S. principle of birthright citizenship was inherited from English common law and predates the writing of the Constitution. Congress ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, three years after the end of the Civil War, to clarify that children of formerly enslaved people were automatically entitled to U.S. citizenship.
The Supreme Court ruled in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark v. United States, which challenged discriminatory provisions of the Chinese Exclusion Act, that a child of Chinese immigrants was a U.S. citizen by birth, despite the fact that his parents were ineligible to become U.S. citizens themselves.
Congress later passed similar language into federal statute.
“There is no exception to the Citizenship Clause’s plain and unconditional grant of U.S. citizenship to all born on American soil and subject to the United States’ sovereign authority,” the Democratic states’ complaint reads.
The lawsuit alleges that Trump acted outside the bounds of his legal authority. And it argues that, by refusing to recognize the citizenship of children with immigrant parents, the order would artificially limit federal support for essential health care, special education and child welfare services, shifting that burden to states.
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Trump repeatedly attacked the principle of birthright citizenship on the campaign trail, pledging to end it as part of a broader attempt to crackdown on unauthorized immigration.