Keith Ellison among 22 state attorneys general suing Trump over birthright citizenship

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison announced Tuesday his office is joining at least 20 other states and the city of San Francisco in lawsuits seeking to stop an executive order signed Monday by President Donald Trump that would end birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to all people born here.
The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution reads, “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’s order would no longer guarantee citizenship to children of unauthorized immigrants, despite the plain language of the Constitution. Trump’s order argues that people born to immigrants who are not here legally are not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
Ellison said the executive order is a violation of the Constitution and Trump’s promise to uphold it.
“The President swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, then broke it almost as soon as he took it,” Ellison said in a release announcing the lawsuit, calling the Trump order an “unprecedented, blatant breach of the Constitution.”
Ellison notes that the U.S. Supreme Court has twice upheld birthright citizenship, regardless of the immigration status of the newborn’s parents.
Without citizenship, the tens of thousands of children born to undocumented immigrants in the United States would become stateless, Ellison argues, “suddenly forced to live under the threat of deportation … with no clear citizenship in any country.”
The ACLU and immigrant rights groups sued the Trump administration in U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire shortly after Trump signed the birthright citizenship order. On Tuesday, Minnesota joined 17 state attorneys general over the order, in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Those states include New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin.
Additionally, state attorneys general from Arizona, Illinois, Oregon and Washington sued the Trump administration in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle over birthright citizenship.
