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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on Tuesday launched its first effort to challenge President Trump’s new attempt at restricting birthright citizenship.
The group wants a federal judge to rule that Trump can’t use a new executive order to deny citizenship to babies who would’ve been covered under his Day 1 attempt that the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional.
“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” Cody Wofsy, the lead counsel on the case and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
“It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end,” he continued.
The Hill has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Trump last week announced a new executive order that would deny birthright citizenship to children born to foreign government employees, alien enemies and so-called birth tourists.
It’s narrower than his original plan that would’ve denied citizenship to babies that didn’t have at least one parent with U.S. citizenship or permanent legal status. In June, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional.
Trump contends his new policy aligns with the narrow constitutional exceptions and will withstand legal scrutiny.
The ACLU is quickly bringing that to a head, but not via a new lawsuit. Instead, it’s asking the trial judge whose months-old ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court to rule that Trump remains forbidden from denying citizenship to anyone covered by that class-action lawsuit.
“To avoid any doubt in this regard, the Court should underscore that the government may not strip away class members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed assertions of Executive power over birthright citizenship,” its motion reads.
The ask heads to U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante, an appointee of former President George W. Bush who serves in New Hampshire.
However, the case has not yet technically returned to Laplante’s courtroom. The Supreme Court’s formal judgment wasn’t sent back to the appeals court until after a waiting period expired earlier this month. That appeals court has not yet sent the case back to Laplante. The ACLU on Tuesday also asked to speed up that process.
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