Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship blocked by federal judge

A federal judge blocked Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order ending birthright citizenship Thursday.

By allowing the case to proceed as a class action lawsuit, the block gets around a 6-3 Supreme Court decision last month that limited judges’ abilities to issue nationwide injunctions on Trump administration policies.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, seeks to protect the class of babies born to temporary residents or unlawful permanent residents since Feb. 20. These children would—unlike generations of children born in similar situations—be deprived of citizenship under Trump’s order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which reinterprets the text of the Fourteenth Amendment.

“The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment specifically enshrined this principle in our Constitution’s text to ensure that no one—not even the President—could deny children born in America their rightful place as citizens,” according to the complaint filed late last month.

Joseph N. Laplante, a U.S. District Court Judge based in New Hampshire wrote in his ruling that members of the class impacted by the end of birthright citizenship are “likely to suffer irreparable harm” if the executive order is not blocked.

By allowing the lawsuit to continue as a class action—a type of civil lawsuit filed on behalf of a large group of similarly-situated people who have been similarly harmed—Laplante’s ruling uses the only remaining workaround to stop policies deemed unlawful from being implemented nationwide. Before the Supreme Court ruled against the practice last month, judges were able to issue “universal,” or nationwide injunctions against such policies.

The Trump administration has 7 days to appeal Laplante’s ruling, and White House officials say they are planning to fight back against the injunction, accusing the judge of “abusing class action certification procedures.”

“Today’s decision is an obvious and unlawful attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s clear order against universal relief,” Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary and special assistant to President Trump, tells Fast Company. “The Trump Administration will be fighting vigorously against the attempts of these rogue district court judges to impede the policies President Trump was elected to implement.”

For immigration rights activists, however, the ruling is a major triumph for the children who would be born stateless if not for birthright citizenship—an estimated 255,000 annually, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

“This ruling is a huge victory and will help protect the citizenship of all children born in the United States, as the Constitution intended,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrant’s Rights Project, said in a statement. “We are fighting to ensure President Trump doesn’t trample on the citizenship rights of one single child.”