On Monday, his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order which stated that the United States government would not give citizenship to a child whose mother had emigrated to the country illegally and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of the child’s birth or if the mother’s presence was lawful but temporary and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident.
On Tuesday, 22 states with Democrat attorneys general sued Trump over the order.
The executive order noted that the Fourteenth 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.” But, the order added, “The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”
The attorneys general filed their complaint in Federal District Court in Massachusetts, the cities of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., joined in the effort, The New York Times reported.
New Jersey’s attorney general, Matthew J. Platkin, complained, “Presidents are powerful, but he is not a king. He cannot rewrite the Constitution with a stroke of the pen.”
The ACLU also immediately filed a lawsuit challenging the executive order, prompting Harrison Fields, White House principal deputy press secretary, to respond, “Radical Leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump to advance his wildly popular agenda. These lawsuits are nothing more than an extension of the Left’s resistance – and the Trump administration is ready to face them in court.”
As far back as 2015, National Review noted, “According to Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) legal policy analyst Jon Feere, who testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security in April, between 350,000 and 400,000 children are born annually to an illegal-alien mother residing in the United States — as many as one in ten births nationwide. As of 2010, four out of five children of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. were born here — some 4 million kids.”
“The 14th Amendment doesn’t say that all persons born in the U.S. are citizens. It says that ‘[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ are citizens,” Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation has written. “That second, critical, conditional phrase is conveniently ignored or misinterpreted by advocates of ‘birthright’ citizenship. Critics erroneously believe that anyone present in the United States has ‘subjected” himself’ to the jurisdiction” of the United States, which would extend citizenship to the children of tourists, diplomats, and illegal aliens alike. But that is not what that qualifying phrase means. Its original meaning refers to the political allegiance of an individual and the jurisdiction that a foreign government has over that individual.”
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