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A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s executive order that denies 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.
John Coughenour, a US district judge in the state of Washington, on Thursday called the policy “blatantly unconstitutional”, as he handed down a temporary restraining order halting the president’s ban, according to media reports.
The decision stems from a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by four Democratic state attorneys-general led by the state of Washington — 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 wave of executive orders the president signed many of them focused on immigration — has 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 that 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 instead argued the Fourteenth Amendment does not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born” in the US.
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 Department of Justice said in a filing on Wednesday that 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”.