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A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order denying US citizenship to children born in the country to unauthorised immigrants, dealing a blow to an immigration clampdown that is a top priority of his second presidency.
Residents of the states who filed the lawsuit led by Washington were “irreparably harmed by depriving them of their constitutional right to citizenship” and by “subjecting them to risk of deportation and family separation; depriving them of access to federal funding for medical care . . . and impacting their education, employment, and health”, John Coughenour, a US district judge in the state of Washington, wrote in the restraining order issued on Thursday.
The decision is temporary but will remain in effect pending a final ruling in the courts.
“These harms are immediate, ongoing, and significant, and cannot be remedied in the ordinary course of litigation,” the judge added.
Speaking from the bench during a hearing on Thursday, Coughenour called the policy “blatantly unconstitutional”, according to news reports.
Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon, said: “Obviously, we’ll appeal it. They put it before a certain judge in Seattle . . . there’s no surprises with that judge.”
The judge’s ruling echoed the opening foray of Trump’s first presidential administration, when he issued an executive order within days of taking office, lowering the number of refugees admitted into the US and suspending entry for travellers from several predominantly Muslim countries. That order, too, was quickly suspended by the courts, though an amended version was eventually upheld.
The birthright order was one among a flurry of policy efforts aimed at imposing strict immigration restrictions. Trump’s order would also extend to children of mothers who give birth in the US during a temporary stay, such as on a work, student or tourist visa.
The ruling stems from a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by four Democratic state attorneys-general — one of several legal challenges that were swiftly mounted against the order that Trump signed on Monday, just hours after being sworn in as president.
Coughenour’s decision marks the first legal setback for Trump’s administration just three days after returning to the White House. The president’s executive orders — many of them focused on immigration — have kicked off what are set to be fierce and drawn-out legal battles.
Other Democratic state attorneys-general as well as civil rights groups this week filed separate lawsuits to invalidate the birthright ban, all alleging similar violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which says all “persons born or naturalised in the US . . . are citizens of the United States”.
The office of Washington’s attorney-general said: “If allowed to stand, the unconstitutional and un-American order would cause thousands of newborns and children in Washington to lose their ability to fully and fairly participate in American society as citizens, despite the Constitution’s guarantee of their citizenship.”
Oregon, Arizona and Illinois joined the lawsuit.
Trump’s order argued the Fourteenth Amendment did not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born” in the US.
The Department of Justice on Thursday said it “will vigorously defend President Trump’s [executive order], which correctly interprets the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution”.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Earlier this week, it said the lawsuits were part of the “left’s resistance” and the administration would face them in court.
The DoJ in a filing on Wednesday said the order was “an integral part of President Trump’s recent actions, pursuant to his significant authority in the immigration field, to address this nation’s broken immigration system and the ongoing crisis at the southern border”.
