Democratic attorneys general from 18 states have already organized and filed a federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s executive order to eradicate birthright citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants and temporary visitors to the country.
The lawsuit was filed in Massachusetts on Tuesday, just hours after Trump took executive action late Monday evening to bar the children born to illegal immigrants in the United States from automatically becoming U.S. citizens. Only U.S. citizens and permanent residents may automatically assume U.S. citizenship for children, Trump maintained.
The executive order was set to take effect in 30 days. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups have also sued over the executive action.
The lawsuit challenges one point of a grander immigration crackdown that the Trump White House launched Monday, targeting the borders, illegal immigrants within the U.S., and more.
“The President’s executive order attempting to rescind birthright citizenship is blatantly unconstitutional and quite frankly, un-American,” said California Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta in a statement Tuesday. “We are asking a court to immediately block this order from taking effect and ensure that the rights of American-born children impacted by this order remain in effect while litigation proceeds.”
States — California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin — are asking for a preliminary injunction to stop the enforcement of the executive order with the end goal of denying the order.
The Democratic attorneys maintained that the new executive order on birthright citizenship violated the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed citizenship to any person born in the U.S.
Trump had vowed in a recent interview with Kristen Welker of NBC News’s Meet the Press to walk back the 14th Amendment, which automatically gives any person born on U.S. soil American citizenship.
“If we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action [during the first term], but then we had to fix COVID first, to be honest with you. We have to end it. It’s ridiculous,” Trump.
The instant legal action is a preview of the uphill climb Trump will have to end birthright citizenship, which he wasn’t able to do during his first term in office.
In October 2018, the then-president insisted that birthright citizenship “will be ended one way or the other,” opening the door for congressional action one day after then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said that doing so by executive action was unconstitutional.
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Trump did not answer Welker’s follow-up questions about the “inevitable” legal challenges.
“We have to get rid of this system. It’s killing our country,” Trump finished.