Press Release: 2025-01-22

AG Campbell Sues Trump Administration Over Unconstitutional Executive Order Ending Birthright Citizenship

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

1/21/2025

MEDIA CONTACT 

Molly McGlynn, Communications Director

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Call Molly McGlynn, Communications Director at 617-727-2543

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Email Molly McGlynn, Communications Director at Molly.McGlynn@mass.gov

BOSTON — Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell and 17 other states, the District of Columbia and the City and County of San Francisco today filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts challenging President Donald Trump’s Executive Order purporting to end the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. The Executive Order flagrantly violates the rights of children born in the United States. 

“Birthright citizenship in our country is a guarantee of equality, born out of a collective fight against oppression, slavery and its devastating harms. It is a settled right in our Constitution and recognized by the Supreme Court for more than a century,” said AG Campbell. “President Trump does not have the authority to take away constitutional rights, and we will fight against his effort to overturn our Constitution and punish innocent babies born in Massachusetts.”

President Trump yesterday issued an Executive Order fulfilling his repeated threat to try to end birthright citizenship, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Section 1401 of the Immigration and Nationality Act.

The states seek to invalidate the President’s Order and to enjoin any actions taken to implement it. The states will request immediate relief to prevent the President’s Order from taking effect. 

The Fourteenth Amendment was adopted in 1868 as a direct response to the infamous Dred Scott decision, which ruled that descendants of slaves could not be United States citizens despite having been born in the United States. The Amendment was designed to address racial inequality in part by granting citizenship to formerly enslaved Black people after the Civil War. The U.S. Supreme Court has long upheld birthright citizenship for individuals born in the United States, regardless of the immigration status of the baby’s parents. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), decided 127 years ago, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the citizenship of an American born in California to parents of Chinese descent, amid a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment in the country. The history of the Fourteenth Amendment is clear that Congress specifically intended birthright citizenship to be the law of the land, as it has been for more than 150 years.  

Despite the Constitution’s guarantee of citizenship, under President Trump’s Order more than 150,000 children born every year in the United States will—for the first time—lose their ability to fully and fairly be a part of American society as citizens with all of citizenship’s benefits and privileges and will be forced to live under the threat of deportation. They will have no ability to obtain a Social Security number and, as they age, to work lawfully. They will have no right to vote, serve on juries, and run for certain offices. And they may be rendered stateless, without a clear claim to citizenship in any country.   

Yesterday’s Order also significantly and directly harms the states themselves. Among other things, this Order will cause the coalition of states to lose federal funding for programs that they administer, such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and foster care and adoption assistance programs, which all turn at least in part on the immigration status of the resident being served. 

States will also be required—on virtually no notice and at considerable expense—to immediately begin modifying their operation and administration of benefits programs to account for this change, which will impose significant burdens on multiple agencies that operate programs for the benefit of residents. Today’s filing explains that states should not have to bear these dramatic costs while their case proceeds because the Order is directly inconsistent with the Constitution, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and U.S. Supreme Court decisions.

The lawsuit is co-led by the attorneys general of Massachusetts, New Jersey and California. Joining this coalition are the attorneys general of Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaiʻi, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin and the City and County of San Francisco.

In Massachusetts, this matter is being handled by Deputy State Solicitor Jerry Cedrone and Assistant Attorney General Jared Cohen of AG Campbell’s Civil Rights Division.