(The Center Square) — A federal judge in New Hampshire has again blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship and expanded the injunction nationwide.
The bench ruling Thursday by U.S. District Court judge Joseph Laplante sides with immigration advocates seeking to certify plaintiffs facing a loss of citizenship as a class-action lawsuit, and set a preliminary injunction indefinitely blocking Trump’s order from being enforced against born and unborn babies. The ruling does not include parents.
Laplante, who was appointed by former Republican President George W. Bush, was expected to issue a written ruling later Thursday. He would stay the ruling for a week to give the Trump administration time to appeal.
The ruling came despite a 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that district court judges can’t issue nationwide injunctions unless the plaintiffs in the case had been certified as a nationwide class. Justices didn’t rule on the constitutionality of Trump’s order ending birthright citizenship. The executive order is set to go into effect on July 27 under the high court’s decision.
A 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. But 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, signed during his first day in office in January, 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 denies 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.
“Today’s decision is an obvious and unlawful attempt to circumvent the Supreme Court’s clear order against universal relief. This judge’s decision disregards the rule of law by abusing class action certification procedures,” White House spokesman Harrison Fields said in a statement Thursday. “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.”
The lawsuit, one of dozens challenging Trump’s order, was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union’s chapters in Massachusetts, Maine and New Hampshire on behalf of an unidentified woman from Honduras who has a pending asylum application and is due to give birth to her fourth child and and a man from Brazil whose U.S. citizen wife gave birth to their first child earlier this year.
The ACLU argues that Trump doesn’t have the authority to end birthright citizenship and is “flouting the Constitution’s dictates, congressional intent, and long standing Supreme Court precedent.”
“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 Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued the case before the court, said in the statement following the ruling. “We are fighting to ensure President Trump doesn’t trample on the citizenship rights of one single child.”
