The lawsuit to block the president’s executive order is the first salvo in what is likely to be a long-running legal fight over immigration policy.
Attorneys general from 22 states sued President Trump in two federal district courts on Tuesday to block an executive order that refuses to recognize the U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrants as citizens, the opening salvo in what promises to be a long legal battle over the Trump administration’s immigration policies.
Eighteen states and two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., challenged the order in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, arguing that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is “automatic” and that neither the president nor Congress has the constitutional authority to revise it. Four other states filed a second lawsuit in the Western District of Washington.
Mr. Trump’s attempt to limit birthright citizenship was “extraordinary and extreme,” said New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, who led one of the legal efforts along with the attorneys general from California and Massachusetts.
“Presidents are powerful,” he said, “but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”
Nick Brown, the attorney general in Washington, said Mr. Trump’s order would deny citizenship to 150,000 newborn children each year.
“It would render them undocumented at birth. It could even render them citizens to no country at all,” said Mr. Brown, whose state was joined by Oregon, Arizona and Illinois.
On Monday, in the opening hours of his second term as president, Mr. Trump signed an order declaring that future children born to undocumented immigrants would no longer be treated as citizens. The order would extend even to the children of some mothers in the country legally but temporarily, such as foreign students or tourists.
Mr. Trump’s executive order asserts that the children of such noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, and thus aren’t covered by the 14th Amendment’s longstanding constitutional guarantee.
The order flew in the face of more than 100 years of legal precedent, when the courts and the executive branch interpreted the 14th Amendment as guaranteeing citizenship to every baby born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ legal status. The courts recognize only a few exceptions — such as the children of accredited diplomats, and children born in U.S. territory that is under the control of an occupying army.
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