The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit over President Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship.
According to the executive order, the Fourteenth Amendment “has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’” In other words, citizenship is not automatically extended to those whose mothers are in the United States illegally and whose fathers are neither U.S. citizens nor lawful permanent residents.
The ACLU claims that denying citizenship to U.S.-born children is a “reckless and ruthless repudiation of American values.”
“Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is. This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans,” ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said. “We will not let this attack on newborns and future generations of Americans go unchallenged. The Trump administration’s overreach is so egregious that we are confident we will ultimately prevail.”
The lawsuit points to the 1898 Supreme Court ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which “confirmed that children born in the United States of noncitizen parents are citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.”
“In the over 125 years since the Supreme Court emphatically rejected the last effort to undercut birthright citizenship in Wong Kim Ark, this principle has remained undisturbed constitutional bedrock. Even through countless subsequent immigration debates, and periods of intense anti-immigrant sentiment, this core constitutional guarantee has protected generations of Americans and prevented the emergence of a hereditary underclass excluded from full participation in American life,” the lawsuit argues.
