President Donald Trump’s day one executive order attempting to redefine birthright citizenship drew immediate legal challenges from local leaders and immigrants’ rights groups in New England.
During his inaugural address, Trump outlined specific policies that he vowed to take action on immediately, and spent much of the day signing several executive orders over a wide range of issues. Among them was the order targeting birthright citizenship.
The order aims to set new national policy by stating that U.S. government agencies shall not issue to people documents recognizing U.S. citizenship, or accept documents issued by state, local, or other governments or authorities purporting to recognize U.S. citizenship, under certain circumstances.
According to the order, the circumstances are when the person’s mother was unlawfully present in the U.S. and the person’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth, or when the person’s mother’s presence in the U.S. was lawful but temporary, and the person’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the person’s birth.
The order quotes the U.S. Constitution 14th Amendment as stating: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” It goes on to assert that the 14th Amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States” and “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ ”
The Jan. 20 order is designed to apply only to relevant individuals born in the U.S. after 30 days from the date of the order.
Hundreds of people rallied in Boston Monday in support of local immigrants and in opposition to Trump’s new policies. Lawsuits challenging the order have already been filed, including in the federal courts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.
Massachusetts immigrant organizations fight back on Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order
In Massachusetts, Lawyers for Civil Rights, alongside immigration advocacy organizations La Colaborativa and the Brazilian Worker Center, filed suit challenging the constitutionality of such an order and pointing out the harm it would cause to targeted groups.
“Denying citizenship to their U.S.-born children undermines the ideals of fairness and opportunity that define America. We will not stand idly by while our children are targeted and their rights and dignity are erased,” wrote Gladys Vega, executive director of La Colaborativa.
The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the president does not have the power to strip away birthright citizenship and provided a different interpretation of the 14th Amendment than what was presented with the executive order.
“The Citizenship Clause’s straightforward text and its history, affirmed by over a century of U.S. Supreme Court precedent, establish that it bestows citizenship upon all persons born in the United States—subject only to highly technical and rare exceptions such as the children of foreign diplomats,” the complaint reads.
It points to previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions, including Trop v. Dulles (1958), which described depriving someone of their citizenship as “the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society” and “is a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”
The complaint also points out that the order will target and impact specific groups.
“Targeted citizens include the children of undocumented parents, immigrants whom the federal government has paroled into the country, and those holding various other immigration statuses. In declaring by fiat that all these people are not citizens and instructing federal agencies not to treat, dignify, or honor them as such, the EO purports to divest the targeted citizens of citizenship and its privileges in the public consciousness and in practice,” it reads.
What did the 14th Amendment intend?
“There’s some good question about whether the children born here really are subject to the jurisdiction of the United states,” said Ira Mehlman at the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Mehlma, the organization’s media director, uses the example of how children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats aren’t U.S. citizens and argues that could extend to undocumented immigrants based on the language of the constitution.
“There are many many reasons why people come to the United States illegally but you know certainly the idea that if you come here and you have a child adds one more incentive,” Mehlman said.
ACLU files lawsuit questioning constitutionality of birthright executive order
Another lawsuit filed in New Hampshire was announced hours after the Inauguration Day executive order was introduced. Similar to the Massachusetts challenge, the lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union alongside the ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, and other groups alleges that the Trump administration is “flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent, and longstanding Supreme Court precedent.”
“Denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is not only unconstitutional — it’s also a reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is. This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans.”
New England attorneys general join challenge to birthright executive order
Democratic attorneys general in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island and Vermont joined 13 other states, the District of Columbia and County of San Francisco Tuesday in another lawsuit challenging the executive order.
“President Trump does not have the authority to take away constitutional rights, and we will fight against his effort to overturn our Constitution and punish innocent babies born in Massachusetts,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a media release.
The AG said their argument also centers around the 14th Amendment, which was adopted in 1868 in response to the historic Dred Scott decision, which ruled that descendants of enslaved people could not be U.S. citizens despite being born in the country. The amendment came out of an effort to address racial inequality by granting citizenship to those groups and others born in the country after the Civil War. The concept of it being tied to a child’s birth location has been backed by other U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
The lawsuit argues that the order is unconstitutional, and also points to issue of how the states will have to address its impact, citing the “dramatic costs” they will incur to make modifications to their existing operations and administrations with this change.
This lawsuit was co-led by the attorneys general of Massachusetts, New Jersey and California, who are joined bythe attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and the City and County of San Francisco.
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