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A US judge has issued a new order blocking Donald Trump’s effort to curtail birthright citizenship, in the first legal challenge to the policy since the Supreme Court allowed it to move forward last month.
The ruling handed down by Joseph Laplante, a district judge in New Hampshire, stems from a class-action lawsuit brought by legal groups on behalf of children affected by the US president’s order.
It comes after the Supreme Court last month blocked lower courts from halting Trump’s order to limit birthright citizenship nationwide in a separate case.
Laplante wrote in his ruling on Thursday that petitioners in the class-action case “have demonstrated likelihood of success on the merits of their claims” and “are likely to suffer irreparable harm” without an injunction, which will come into force in seven days to give the government a chance to appeal. His decision was “in the public interest”, Laplante added.
The top court last month granted the Trump administration’s request to limit lower court injunctions to the individual parties bringing lawsuits, rather than having a nationwide scope.
But just hours after the Supreme Court’s order, several legal groups filed a class-action lawsuit seeking to represent all children born in the US, which led to Laplante’s decision.
“This ruling is a huge victory and will help protect the citizenship of all children born in the United States, as the Constitution intended,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, who argued the case against the government. “We are fighting to ensure President Trump doesn’t trample on the citizenship rights of one single child.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Fourteenth Amendment holds that all “persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States”. But Trump has argued that it does not “extend citizenship universally to everyone born” in the country.
The president’s executive order denies American citizenship to children born in the country to unauthorised immigrants. US states, advocacy groups and individuals filed numerous lawsuits challenging the measure as illegal. Ahead of the Supreme Court decision, lower courts had ordered nationwide injunctions blocking it from taking effect, with one branding the order “blatantly unconstitutional”.
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