Washington, Jan 21 (EFE) – A group of 18 states with Democratic governments filed a lawsuit Tuesday against President Donald Trump in opposition to his attempt to end birthright citizenship in the United States through an executive order.
The lawsuit calls Trump’s plan a “flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands (of) American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”
It also states that Trump’s order violates the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which guarantees the right to citizenship to anyone born in the United States, except the children of diplomats.
Trump’s order, signed hours after his inauguration, states that people born in the US to undocumented parents or with temporary legal status – such as a work or tourist visa – cannot obtain US citizenship.
In the lawsuit, the states – including New York, Connecticut, Colorado, California, and the cities of Washington and San Francisco – assert that “the President has no authority to rewrite or nullify a constitutional amendment or a duly enacted statute. Nor is he authorized by any other source of law to restrict who receives United States citizenship at birth.”
“This is a war on American families waged by a president with zero respect for our Constitution. We have sued, and I have every confidence we will win,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said.
In practice, ending birthright citizenship would prevent the State Department from issuing passports to children born to undocumented parents and the Social Security Administration from recognizing them as citizens, making it difficult for them to access basic rights and work legally in the country.
Ending birthright citizenship has been a recurring demand of conservative groups. Trump had threatened to revoke it through an executive order during his first term (2017-2021).
The most direct way to redefine birthright citizenship would be to propose a constitutional amendment, which requires a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate and ratification by three-fourths of the states, as historian Scott Bomboy recently explained in an analysis published by the National Constitution Center.
There are no exact figures on the number of children born in the US to undocumented parents. According to the most recent data from the Pew Research Center, there were about 1.3 million US adults in 2022 whose parents lacked legal status.
A 2018 report by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan institute, found that the current interpretation of the 14th Amendment means that the children of undocumented immigrants are currently US citizens.
“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,” says the amendment.
However, the study warns that the Supreme Court has not recently settled the issue, potential legal challenges could change the current interpretation. EFE
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