Trump's order curtailing US birthright citizenship blocked by 4th judge

By Nate Raymond

BOSTON, Feb 13 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's effort to curtail automatic birthright citizenship as part of his hardline immigration crackdown suffered a further setback on Thursday as a fourth judge declared it unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin in Boston at the behest of immigrant rights groups and Democratic attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia issued a nationwide injunction blocking implementation of an executive order Trump signed on his first day back in office on Jan. 20.

The Republican president's order directed U.S. agencies to refuse to recognize the citizenship of children born in the United States after February 19 if neither their mother nor father is a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident.

But Sorokin, an appointee of Democratic former President Barack Obama, said Trump's order violated a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment that guarantees that virtually anyone born in the United States is a citizen.

At a hearing last week, Justice Department attorney Eric Hamilton had argued the plaintiffs, past administrations and even Supreme Court justices had misread the 14th Amendment to extend citizenship to children born to non-permanent residents and that executive order was "consistent with the law."

Sorokin said the administration's position disregarded that the 14th Amendment's original purpose was "to recognize as birthright citizens the children of enslaved persons who did not enter the country consensually, but were brought to our shores in chains."

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868 following the U.S. Civil War, overturned the Supreme Court's notorious 1857 Dred Scott decision that had declared that the Constitution's protections did not apply to enslaved Black people.

"Simply put, the Amendment is the Nation’s consent to accept and protect as citizens those born here, subject to the few narrow exceptions recognized at the time of enactment, none of which are at issue here," Sorokin wrote.

The preliminary injunction he issued created an extra legal barrier for Trump's order to take effect, after federal judges in Maryland, Washington state and New Hampshire similarly blocked the order's enforcement.

"President Trump may believe that he is above the law, but today’s preliminary injunction sends a clear message: He is not a king, and he cannot rewrite the Constitution with the stroke of a pen," Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement.

The administration is expected to appeal, as it already has in the Washington state and Maryland cases. The U.S. Department of Justice and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The two cases before Sorokin were filed by a group of Democratic state attorneys general, the city of San Francisco, immigrant advocacy organizations La Colaborativa and the Brazilian Worker Center, and a pregnant immigrant.

Lawyers for the Trump administration argue that the executive order is vital to ending what it considers a "loophole" to U.S. citizenship that has perversely encouraged illegal immigration.

If allowed to stand, Trump's order would for the first time deny more than 150,000 children born annually in the United States the right to citizenship, the plaintiffs say.

They say the U.S. Supreme Court clearly ruled in 1898 in the case United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause guaranteed the right to birthright citizenship regardless of a child's parent's immigration status.

The case is State of New Jersey et al v. Trump et al, U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, No. 1:25-cv-10139.

For the states: Shankar Duraiswamy of the New Jersey Office of the Attorney General

For the private plaintiffs: Oren Sellstrom of Lawyers for Civil Rights

For the U.S.: Eric Hamilton of the U.S. Department of Justice