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The states have argued that Trump’s birthright citizenship order is blatantly unconstitutional and threatens millions of dollars for health insurance services contingent on citizenship status. The issue is expected to move quickly back to the nation’s highest court. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement, “We look forward to being vindicated on appeal.” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, who helped lead the lawsuit before Sorokin, said, “The district court again barred President Trump’s flagrantly unconstitutional birthright citizenship order from taking effect anywhere.” He added, “American-born babies are American, just as they have been at every other time in our Nation’s history. The President cannot change that legal rule with the stroke of a pen.”
Lawyers for the government argued that Sorokin should narrow the reach of his earlier ruling granting a preliminary injunction, saying it should be “tailored to the States’ purported financial injuries.” However, Sorokin said a patchwork approach would not protect the states because many people move between them. He also criticized the Trump administration for failing to explain how a narrower injunction could work without imposing significant administrative or financial burdens.
Sorokin wrote: “That is, they have never addressed what renders a proposal feasible or workable, how the defendant agencies might implement it without imposing material administrative or financial burdens on the plaintiffs, or how it squares with other relevant federal statutes. In fact, they have characterized such questions as irrelevant to the task the Court is now undertaking. The defendants’ position in this regard defies both law and logic.”
The administration has not yet appealed any of the recent court rulings. Trump’s efforts to deny citizenship to children born to parents who are in the country illegally or temporarily will remain blocked unless and until the Supreme Court says otherwise.
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A federal judge in New Hampshire earlier this month also prohibited Trump’s executive order from taking effect nationwide, issuing a ruling in a new class-action lawsuit. U.S. District Judge Joseph LaPlante in New Hampshire had paused his own decision to allow for the Trump administration to appeal but allowed it when no appeal was filed. On Wednesday, a San Francisco-based appeals court found the president’s executive order unconstitutional and affirmed a lower court’s nationwide block. A Maryland-based judge said she would do the same if an appeals court signed off.
The Supreme Court ruled last month that lower courts generally can’t issue nationwide injunctions but did not rule out other court orders with nationwide effects, including in class-action lawsuits and those brought by states. The justices did not decide whether the underlying citizenship order is constitutional. Plaintiffs in the Boston case argued that the principle of birthright citizenship is “enshrined in the Constitution” and that Trump does not have the authority to issue the order, which they called a “flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands of American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage.”
They also argue that Trump’s order halting automatic citizenship for babies born to people in the U.S. illegally or temporarily would cost states funding they rely on to provide essential services — from foster care to health care for low-income children, to early interventions for infants, toddlers, and students with disabilities.
At the heart of the lawsuits is the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1868 after the Civil War and the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision. That decision found that Scott, an enslaved man, wasn’t a citizen despite having lived in a state where slavery was outlawed.
The Trump administration has asserted that children of noncitizens are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and therefore not entitled to citizenship. Jackson, the White House spokeswoman, said, “These courts are misinterpreting the purpose and the text of the 14th Amendment.”
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What was New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin's stance on Trump’s birthright citizenship order?
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