BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell filed a federal lawsuit, along with attorneys general from 17 other states, challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants.
Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, but President Trump said in his order that the amendment “has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”
The 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision of 1857, in which the Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people could not be citizens of the United States.
Trump’s order said that birthright citizenship does not apply if a child’s parents were “unlawfully present” in the U.S. or if the parent’s presence was “lawful but temporary,” like a tourist.
But, the attorneys general disagree with that interpretation, pointing to generations of legal precedent, including the 1898 ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The “Supreme Court rejected a challenge ejected 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.”
“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,” Campbell said in a statement. “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.”
The states in the lawsuit include Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, Wisconsin, as well as D.C. and the City and County of San Francisco.
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