Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order

A Haitian mother holds her newborn inside a tent in the large migrant camp near an international bridge at the U.S.-Mexico border in Del Rio, Texas, on Sept. 21, 2021. John Moore/Getty Images

A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking the Trump administration from implementing the president’s order ending automatic U.S. citizenship for children of illegal immigrants present in the United States.

While issuing the order on Feb. 6, Judge John Coughenour of the Western District of Washington accused President Donald Trump of seeing the rule of law as an impediment to his policy goals. He said the rule of law was a beacon of light in his courtroom and that he intended to protect it.

Birthright citizenship, he said, was a “fundamental constitutional right” and that Trump’s order was effectively an amendment presented as an order. His decision came after he entered a temporary restraining order in January and described Trump’s order as “blatantly unconstitutional.”

A federal judge in Maryland also issued a nationwide preliminary injunction just a day before Coughenour’s.

The rulings came in response to a number of legal challenges, with several cases filed nationwide by Democratic state officials, immigrant rights organizations, and pregnant women seeking to block Trump’s policy.

The lawsuit in Washington was initially brought by the states of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon in January. Besides the lawsuit in Maryland, another challenge to Trump’s order has been raised in Massachusetts, where a long list of states, the District of Columbia, and the County of San Francisco brought a suit last month.

Washington state Assistant Attorney General Lane Polozola, who represented plaintiff states before Coughenour, told the judge that both the Constitution and the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark meant that Trump’s order was unconstitutional. The 1898 case involved a man born to parents of Chinese descent who was denied re-entry to the United States after a visit to China.

Polozola urged the judge to issue a nationwide injunction to provide states with complete relief, arguing that state borders shouldn’t mean the difference between being a citizen and not being one. He said Coughenour should enter the injunction even though the federal judge in Maryland had already issued a nationwide injunction, saying that the plaintiffs couldn’t rely on that case.

Drew Ensign, deputy assistant attorney general with the Department of Justice, argued that the 14th Amendment and the Wong Kim Ark case shouldn’t be read as granting citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants. Instead, he said, the case centered on a man who was born to lawful permanent residents of the United States.

The citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Trump’s order on birthright citizenship, signed on Jan. 20, argued that an individual who is born in the United States is not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” if that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the country and the individual’s father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of his or her birth.

It further stated that the privilege of U.S. citizenship does not apply to an individual whose mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and whose father was neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident at the time of that individual’s birth.

Shortly after Ensign stopped speaking, Coughenour issued his order verbally. In a written order, Coughenour said that the plain meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction” includes “anyone who answers to the political or judicial authority of the United States.”

He said that “unequivocally applies to children born in the territorial United States—regardless of the immigration status of their parents.”

The plaintiff states faced irreparable harm from Trump’s order, according to the judge.

“The Order will directly impact the Plaintiff states, immediately increasing unrecoverable costs for providing essential medical care and social services to the States’s residents and creating substantial administrative costs for state agencies that are forced to comply with the Order,” Coughenour said.

For other individual plaintiffs involved, he said that they faced irreparable harm through “constitutional infringement and the specter of deportation.”