Third federal judge blocks Trump’s executive order to gut birthright citizenship 

(CN) — A federal judge in New Hampshire on Monday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that would drastically limit the longstanding meaning of birthright citizenship.

It’s the third time that a federal court has barred this directive. U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, a George W. Bush appointee, followed in the footsteps of two other federal judges — one in Washington and one in Maryland — in preventing the order from taking effect as its constitutionality is litigated.

“The court hereby finds that plaintiffs have demonstrated a likelihood of success on the merits of their claims; that plaintiffs are likely to suffer irreparable harm if the order is not granted; that the potential harm to the plaintiffs if the order is not granted outweighs the potential harm to defendants if the order is granted; and that the issuance of this order is in the public interest,” Laplante wrote in a two-page order granting a preliminary injunction request.

The controversial executive order seeks to end the longstanding practice of automatically granting citizenship to children born on U.S. soil, regardless of where their parents are from.

Trump’s order would narrow birthright citizenship to people who have one or more parents who are already U.S. citizens, despite the 14th Amendment of the Constitution mandating that anyone “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.”

Trump is challenging the longstanding constitutional interpretation with his executive order, which proclaims:

“The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The 14th Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

Trump signed the order just hours after his inauguration last month, and he has already been taken to court over its legality on numerous occasions. In this lawsuit in New Hampshire, the American Civil Liberties Union is accusing the Trump administration of violating the Constitution and attempting to “upend one of the most fundamental American constitutional values."

The ACLU brought the case on behalf of immigrants’ rights groups and pregnant women whose unborn children could be denied citizenship under Trump’s order.

“Today’s ruling is the latest rebuke of President Trump’s wildly unconstitutional bid to end birthright citizenship,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement Monday. “This attempt to deny babies their citizenship is as illegal as it is inhumane, and we will keep fighting until we stop this order for good.”

SangYeob Kim, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of New Hampshire, said in a statement that he was “glad the court agreed” that Trump’s order is a “blatant violation of our Constitution.”

“The U.S. Constitution ensures that no politician can decide who among those born in this country is worthy of citizenship — a principle that the federal court in New Hampshire reinforced yet again today,” Kim said. “President Trump’s executive order, now preliminarily enjoined in multiple lawsuits across the country, stands in flagrant opposition to our constitutional rights, values and history.”

The Trump Administration has not yet commented on the order Monday.

Trump is also being sued over the order by 18 state attorneys general, who called Trump’s move “a flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands [of] American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”

A federal judge in Massachusetts heard arguments in that case last week, but did not immediately rule on the states’ request for a preliminary injunction.

If Trump’s order would take effect, it wouldn’t just strip citizenship rights from the children of undocumented immigrants. It could also impact those born to parents who are in the United States legally on a temporary basis, like those on student or H-1B visas.

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