A federal judge in New Hampshire issued an injunction Monday blocking President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, the third federal judge to do so. The executive order instructed the government to stop recognizing as citizens any children who are born on U.S. soil to undocumented immigrant parents.
Judge Joseph N. Laplante of the U.S. District Court in New Hampshire said he would issue an injunction immediately, and that he would follow it on Tuesday with an explanatory order detailing his reasoning.
The executive order has already been blocked indefinitely by a federal judge in Maryland, who issued a nationwide injunction last week, and by a similar action by another federal judge in Seattle.
The Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration — both legal and illegal — has prompted at least 10 lawsuits, seven of them challenging his executive order about birthright citizenship.
The federal lawsuit filed in New Hampshire lawsuit was brought by three state branches of the American Civil Liberties Union, in New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Maine. Two other organizations, the Asian Law Caucus and the State Democracy Defenders Fund, helped file the suit on behalf of several groups that assist immigrants, including New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support.
Cody Wofsy, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, argued in court on Monday that Mr. Trump’s order violated the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to virtually all persons born on U.S. soil, and that it then “piled on” a violation of the separation of powers clause.
“They say the president needs flexibility to rewrite our citizenship rules, the DNA of this country, and that is just not the Constitution we live under,” Mr. Wofsy said.
Drew Ensign, representing the government, argued that children of undocumented immigrants have a divided allegiance, and ties to “a foreign power,” that must be considered in deciding their citizenship status.
The executive order declared that children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants after Feb. 19 would not be treated as citizens. Neither, it declared, would children born to noncitizen parents who were in the United States legally but temporarily, like tourists or seasonal workers with short-term visas.