ANNAPOLIS – Maryland joined more than a dozen other states on Tuesday in challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order to end the birthright citizenship the U.S. extends to all people born in the country regardless of their parents’ legal status.
Anthony G. Brown, Maryland’s attorney general, said the Trump order violates the 14th Amendment as well as federal law. Brown and the other attorneys general filed the suit against Trump in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.
“Birthright citizenship is a right enshrined in our Constitution,” Brown said in a press release issued on Tuesday. “It is a reflection of our country’s ideals, a belief that every baby born on U.S. soil is a member of our great nation and deserves to play a part in its future.”
The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says that “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.”
Ending that, said Brown, would be “un-American.”
“Our office will vigorously challenge this blatantly unconstitutional decision in court,” he said.
The order was one of Trump’s very first executive acts after his inauguration this week. Posted on the White House website, the order says that citizenship should not be granted to a person whose mother was unlawfully or temporarily present in the U.S. at the time of the child’s birth, and whose father was not a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.
Trump issued the order on Monday amid a slew of executive orders that ranged from withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization to announcing pardons for people convicted or criminally charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
According to the filing, Maryland joins in the suit with the states of New Jersey, Massachusetts, California, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Michigan, Colorado, Delaware, Nevada, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Vermont, Wisconsin and North Carolina along with Washington, D.C., and the city and county of San Francisco.
“In his inaugural remarks, President Trump promised to ‘restore fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law,’” U.S. Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, said in a statement sent to Capital News Service. “He betrayed his own words almost immediately by pardoning roughly 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.”
Advocates are also gearing up to fight the Trump order.
“It is such an obvious violation of the Constitution,” Jossie Flor Sapunar, the national communications director for CASA, a Latino advocacy organization, told CNS. “The 14th Amendment is very clear in the guarantee that any person born or naturalized in the U.S. is a citizen of the U.S. and whatever state they reside in.”
The organization is preparing to file its own lawsuit against Trump, she said.
“The fact that President Trump thinks that he is higher in power than the Constitution is wrong,” Sapunar said, “and he’s going to find out just how quick he is mistaken.”