“Presidents are powerful,” New Jersey Attorney General Platkin said, “but he is not a king.”
The attorneys general of 22 states have filed lawsuits challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship.
According to The New York Times, eighteen states and two cities—San Francisco, and the District of Columbia—filed a joint claim in a Massachusetts federal court. In their lawsuit, the attorneys general argue that birthright citizenship is a privilege automatically conferred by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The second lawsuit was filed by four other states in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
If enacted and enforced, Trump’s executive order would eliminate birthright citizenship for children who are born in the United States but do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or U.S. permanent resident.
In a statement, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin characterized the incoming Trump administration’s effort to eradicate birthright citizenship as both “extraordinary and extreme.”
“Presidents are powerful,” Platkin said, “but he is not a king.”
“He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen,” he said.
Platkin also criticized the exact language used in the executive order, which seems to suggest that undocumented parents and children are not subject to the legal jurisdiction of the United States.
“For an administration that is taking such a hard line on undocumented immigration and removing those individuals, saying they do not have jurisdiction over those people is directly in contradiction to what they are saying in other aspects of their immigration policy,” he said.
“Birthright citizenship has been part of the fabric of this nation for centuries. And it was put in the Constitution 157 years ago in the wake of the Civil War, when the people of this nation said we were no longer going to let the political whims determine whether or not someone born on United States soil is an American citizen,” Platkin told National Public Radio’s Steve Inskeep.
“And it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court multiple times. This is until Monday night, not something that was ever contested by a president who signed an order that was extraordinary, unprecedented and upended the rule of law.”
Washington Attorney General Nick Brown raised concerns that, if enforced, Trump’s executive order would deny American citizenship to about 150,000 newborn babies each year.
“It would render them undocumented at birth,” Brown said. “It could even render them citizens to no country at all.”
Brown told The New York Times that he expects his office to be involved in further claims against the Trump administration, but stressed that he will not challenge executive orders that may seem objectionable but are otherwise legal.
“I have no interest in continuing to sue the president of the United States, whether it’s Donald Trump or whoever the next president is, but it is my oath to defend the Constitution,” Brown said.
Sources
An attorney general explains how states will fight Trump’s birthright citizenship ban
Twenty-two States Sue to Stop Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order
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