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(CN) — President Donald Trump’s controversial Day 1 executive order to end birthright citizenship in the United States is already causing legal uproar after 18 states, the District of Columbia and the city and county of San Francisco filed a lawsuit Tuesday challenging the order.
Shortly after Trump’s inauguration on Monday, he signed an executive order that aims to narrow birthright citizenship to people who have one or more parents who are already U.S. citizens.
It’s a move that the multi-state coalition called “a flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands [of] American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”
“President Trump now seeks to abrogate this well-established and longstanding constitutional principle by executive fiat,” the coalition claims in the lawsuit. “The president has no authority to rewrite or nullify a constitutional amendment or duly enacted statute. Nor is he empowered by any other source of law to limit who receives United States citizenship at birth.”
The 50-page complaint was filed in federal court in Massachusetts. Three Democratic state attorneys general co-led the lawsuit: Matthew Platkin of New Jersey, Rob Bonta of California and Andrea Campbell of Massachusetts.
“Birthright citizenship in our country is a guarantee of equality, born out of a collective fight against oppression, slavery and its devastating harms,” Campbell said in a statement announcing the complaint. “It is a settled right in our Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court for more than a century. 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.”
In joining the lawsuit, New York Attorney General Letitia James called Trump’s executive order “not just unconstitutional,” but “profoundly dangerous.”
“This fundamental right to birthright citizenship, rooted in the 14th Amendment and born from the ashes of slavery, is a cornerstone of our nation’s commitment to justice,” James said in a statement. “Our Constitution is not open to reinterpretation by executive order or presidential decree.”
The attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin also make up the coalition.
Attorneys general in Arizona, Washington state, Oregon and Illinois formed their own coalition to sue Trump on Tuesday on the same grounds in the Western District of Washington. They claim that hundreds of thousands of children nationally will be stripped of their citizenship under Trump’s order, leaving them with no immigration status and burdening the states.
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War to establish citizenship for Black Americans post-slavery. It mandates 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.”
It’s been the longstanding interpretation of the amendment that birthright citizenship extends to those born in the U.S. to parents who are not citizens. Trump’s executive order rejects that interpretation.
“The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” Trump proclaimed in his order. “The 14th Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
The coalition of attorneys general argue in their lawsuit that Trump’s interpretation defies decades of legal precedent from multiple branches of government that found otherwise.
“The executive branch has embraced this understanding of the citizenship clause for more than a century,” the coalition claims. “Indeed, in 1995, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) provided a statement to Congress opining that proposed legislation that would deny citizenship to certain children born in the United States based on their parents’ immigration or citizenship status would be ‘unquestionably unconstitutional.’”
A spokesperson for Trump’s transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
If upheld, Trump’s executive order 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.
Numerous civil rights groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have filed federal lawsuits of their own in Massachusetts and other jurisdictions challenging Trump’s order.
“This order, entitled ‘Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,’ is an attack on a fundamental constitutional protection, and one that is central to equality and inclusion,” the ACLU said in a statement on Tuesday. “Every attack on birthright citizenship, from the 19th century until now, has been grounded in racism.”
The executive order was one of more than 40 that Trump signed on the first day of his presidency.
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