President Donald Trump met his first policy failure on Thursday, when a federal judge in Seattle swiftly blocked the new administration’s attempt to unilaterally unravel the 14th Amendment and eradicate birthright citizenship.
U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour said in the court that the executive order was “blatantly unconstitutional,” according to The New York Times.
Coughenour’s order issued a 14-day temporary restraining order and said the executive order presented “harms” that “are immediate, ongoing, and significant, and cannot be remedied in the ordinary course of litigation.”
Speaking of the millions who could be affected by Trump’s sweeping measure, the judge explained that it is “depriving them of their constitutional right to citizenship and all the associated rights and benefits, including: subjecting them to risk of deportation and family separation.”
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The executive order was among the very first that Trump signed in the Oval Office on his first day in office. Titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” it seeks to redefine the plain text of the Constitution that 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 is attempting to strip citizenship from the children of immigrants in the United States who have either temporary visas or are here without valid documentation.
Critics of the order — such as San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu and Harold Solis, co-director of the pro-immigration nonprofit Make the Road New York — say Trump is creating an “underclass” of stateless people who cannot legally work, travel abroad or receive government benefits.
Once the order was signed, there was a race across the country to get it blocked in court; several lawsuits challenged the executive order and sought an injunction to keep it from going into effect.
This first stumbling block came from a lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington. Similar challenges by 18 other state attorneys general and the ACLU are currently underway in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, respectively.
Coughenour’s order was not immediately posted in the court docket.
Trump’s executive order is being defended by the Justice Department. Court records show that the team of government lawyers includes a veteran litigator from Trump’s first administration: Brett Shumate, who was, until last week, a partner in the Washington offices of Jones Day, a law firm that is often used to funnel conservative attorneys into government.
The other three government lawyers listed in the court docket all work as career officials at the DOJ’s civil division.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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