A federal court judge in Boston has issued a preliminary injunction blocking President Donald Trump’s executive order calling for an end to birthright citizenship, the latest in a flurry of rulings from the controversial directive.
The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin sides with New York Attorney General Leticia James and 17 other attorneys general who sued to block Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship, which holds that anyone born on U.S. soil is considered a citizen at birth, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The judge set a preliminary injunction blocking the order from going into effect while the legal challenge plays out.
“The Constitution confers birthright citizenship broadly, including to persons within the categories described in the executive order,” Sorokin, an Obama appointee, wrote in the 31-page ruling.
James, a Democrat, praised the ruling in a statement on social media, boasting that the AGs had prevailed in the first round in the legal fight over Trump’s “hateful and unlawful executive order” on birthright citizenship.
“President Trump may believe that he is above the law, but today’s preliminary injunction sends a clear message: He is not a king, and he cannot rewrite the Constitution with the stroke of a pen,” the attorneys general said in a joint statement. “This is not yet over, and we will continue to fight every single step of the way until President Trump is permanently prevented from trampling on the Fourteenth Amendment rights of all Americans.”
Sorokin’s ruling is the fourth blocking Trump’s executive order. Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante in New Hampshire issued a ruling temporarily halting the order, following similar rulings by federal judges in Seattle and Maryland. The Justice Department is reportedly in the process of filing appeals to those rulings.
A U.S. Supreme Court ruling more than a century ago held that children born in the U.S. to foreign parents are U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment. However, the Trump administration claims the 14th Amendment has “never been interpreted” to give universal citizenship to everyone born in the country.
Trump’s executive order directs federal agencies to refuse to recognize U.S. citizenship for children born in the U.S. to mothers who are in the country illegally or here legally on visas if the father is not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order also calls for denying U.S. citizenship to those children born in the U.S. if at least one parent isn’t an American citizen or green card holder, according to the Trump administration.
But James and other Democratic attorneys general argue that birthright citizenship is a “settled” right in the Constitution and that Trump does not have the authority to issue the order, which they called an “unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”
The American Civil Liberties Union’s chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire filed a similar lawsuit arguing that Trump is “flouting the Constitution’s dictates and long standing Supreme Court precedent.”
