A group of immigrant parents filed a class-action lawsuit against President Donald Trump on Monday, arguing that his latest attempt to uproot birthright citizenship violates the 14th Amendment and more than a century of Supreme Court precedent.
The case, filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., centers around Trump’s August executive order, which aims to strip citizenship from children born in the United States via surrogacy, to a parent employed by international organizations or to a parent the government claims to be a gang member.
“For Plaintiffs — children who will be denied citizenship under [the order], and their parents — and for families across the country, [the order] seeks to strip away the ‘priceless treasure’ of citizenship, threatening them with a lifetime of exclusion from society and fear of deportation from the only country they have ever known,” the legal complaint states.
A federal judge in Marylandalready blocked the new order from being enforced against children covered by an earlier class-action suit, calling it “almost certainly unconstitutional” as applied to that group. Monday’s lawsuit seeks protection for a broader class of families targeted by the new restrictions, including some who fall outside the earlier case’s parental immigration-status requirements.
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Before that, the high court ruled against the president in Trump v. Barbara, striking down his Day 1 executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.
The Monday filing, made by attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups, focuses on three families named as plaintiffs in the class-action suit. The plaintiffs contend the restrictions unlawfully expand narrow exceptions to birthright citizenship, including one for children of foreign diplomats with full diplomatic immunity.
One child, referred to as “Nathan” in the filing, was born in Washington just days after Trump’s second executive order. Nathan’s mother is French-born and has spent ten years in D.C. Both parents work for international organizations and hold visas for that type of work, according to the complaint.
Another plaintiff, an Australian father identified as “Edward,” is expecting a child through a U.S. surrogate in October. His eldest daughter, also born through surrogacy in the United States in 2021, is an American citizen.
The complaint also challenges new documentation requirements that attorneys say could burden families beyond those directly targeted by the order. State Department guidance calls for sworn “attestations” from both noncitizen parents seeking a child’s passport, a requirement the plaintiffs argue could be impossible to meet when a father is unknown or unavailable.
Those attestations will be “difficult or even impossible to provide,” the complaint states, effectively denying proof of citizenship to “people even beyond those targeted” by the executive order.
Affected children could face denial of passports and Social Security numbers, barriers to benefits and the threat of deportation, the lawsuit alleges.
Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, highlighted the group’s previous successes in a press statement Monday announcing the new lawsuit.
“The Constitution is clear, and the Supreme Court has been clear: Birthright citizenship is the law of the land,” Wofsy said. “The Trump administration’s newest attack on this fundamental American principle is just as cruel and illegal as its previous executive order, and it will meet the same fate in court.”
The White House did not immediately respond to The Washington Sun’s request for comment.
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