California Takes Aim at Trump’s ‘Un-American’ Citizenship Order in New Lawsuit

Updated 11:53 a.m. Tuesday

California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Tuesday morning filed a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s plan to stop recognizing birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents.

The lawsuit asks the court for a preliminary injunction to immediately block Trump’s executive order from taking effect, Bonta said at a press conference in San Francisco, saying the order flouts over 125 years of settled legal precedent. It is also being led by the attorneys general from Massachusetts and New Jersey, and is joined by those from 15 other states and Washington, as well as the city attorney of San Francisco.

It marks the first lawsuit filed against the new Trump administration by California, which has promised to serve as a bulwark against actions that state officials see as unconstitutional.

“I am deeply disappointed that we’re here one day into the new administration and also not at all surprised,” Bonta said at the press conference.

“Trump is following through on a campaign promise,” he continued. “Today, I’m also following through on a promise to take action if Trump violates the law and infringes on our rights, on your rights, as he did today with what is frankly an un-American executive order. I have one message for President Trump: I’ll see you in court.”

Noting the century-plus of Supreme Court precedent, Bonta said the questions around birthright citizenship were “done and dusted.” “Of course, to Trump, law and order, judicial precedents, constitutional rights have little bearing,” he said.

Meanwhile, state political leaders and immigrant advocates are also considering lawsuits over Trump’s directive to use the military for immigration enforcement and border security.

Those measures are part of a raft of executive actions Trump signed Monday addressing immigration and border security.

Bonta told KQED on Monday that his office has spent months preparing and coordinating with Democratic attorneys general from other states and advocacy organizations within California.

“Our North Star is the rule of law. And the question we ask ourselves is, ‘Is he violating the law?’” Bonta said. “To undermine birthright citizenship without going through the process … to amend the Constitution? We will take him to court, and we believe very strongly that we will prevail. The president cannot amend the Constitution unilaterally.”

Bonta pointed out that it was a San Francisco-born son of Chinese immigrants, Wong Kim Ark, who sued all the way to the Supreme Court in 1898 when his citizenship was challenged at the border. His case set the precedent establishing birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

“That’s very much a California story and a Bay Area story,” Bonta said. “It’s obviously now impacting millions of people who enjoy birthright citizenship from a lot of different heritages and national origins.”

City Attorney David Chiu, who joined the lawsuit, spoke Tuesday about Wong’s case and said “The story of birthright citizenship is as San Francisco as they come.”

“To deny some children the basic rights that other children in our country have will create a permanent, multi-generational underclass of those who will have been born in our country but will never have lived anywhere else and be effectively stateless,” Chiu said. “These children will not be able to naturalize or obtain citizenship from another country. They will live under constant threat of deportation. And as they age, they won’t be able to work lawfully or vote.”

In addition to the “personal chaos” that Chiu said Trump’s order would create for the immigrant community, he noted that it would lead to the loss of federal funding for public benefits programs like food stamps.

Such funding is based in part on the number of eligible recipients, and “without Social Security numbers, San Francisco cannot verify otherwise eligible newborns who qualify for these programs,” Chiu said, although the city “will still have to bear the inherent costs of caring for our residents, whether or not they have Social Security numbers.”

Bonta added that his office will be reviewing the president’s order to use the military for immigration enforcement and deciding whether to challenge it.

San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus joined the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups to file a lawsuit over Trump’s birthright citizenship order on Monday.

Aarti Kohli, the Asian Law Caucus’ executive director, said her organization is determined to protect the civil rights of Bay Area immigrants and their families.

“If you’re born here, you are a citizen — period. No politician, including President Trump, can decide who is American and who is not,” she said.

Kohli said she was also alarmed by the possibility that Trump could invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the deportation of foreign nationals of a country at war with the U.S., to go after immigrant gang members, something he pledged in his inaugural address.

The act was last used during World War II to imprison Japanese, German and Italian immigrants, a move the federal government later repudiated as discriminatory. In 1983, the Asian Law Caucus helped overturn the conviction of Fred Korematsu, an Oakland man who refused the U.S. Army’s order to go into an incarceration camp.

“We’ve seen this playbook before — using national security as a pretext to target specific communities,” Kohli said. “History shows that harsh immigration policies don’t make us safer or more prosperous. They destabilize communities, hurt local businesses that depend on immigrant workers and divert resources from addressing genuine public safety concerns.”

In recent weeks, Bonta has been touring the state to spread the word about the state’s “sanctuary laws,” such as the 2017 California Values Act, which limit local law enforcement and public resources from being used to assist the federal government in immigration enforcement.

State laws don’t prevent immigration enforcement agencies from operating in California, and the U.S. Border Patrol arrested 78 people in Kern County last week. The incident sparked fear in immigrant communities, and some agricultural workers reportedly stayed away from their jobs for days.

Masih Fouladi, executive director of the California Immigrant Policy Center, said his organization is working with other groups to offer “know your rights” workshops to immigrants who may lack legal status. Among other things, he counsels immigrants not to open the door for immigration agents unless they can produce a judicial warrant.

Fouladi said he is concerned that Trump’s declaration of a national emergency at the border to mobilize military resources could lead to mistreatment of migrants and violations of their rights, similar to what occurred when the first Trump administration declared a “zero tolerance” policy, which led to migrant children being forcibly separated from their parents.

“Those types of policies the last time around were so dehumanizing that tore families apart and led to family separation,” he said. “We will be working with local and state elected officials to see how we can make sure that families, at least here in California, are as protected as possible.”

On Monday, Trump rescinded a number of former President Joe Biden’s executive orders on immigration, including measures to coordinate with other countries in addressing the causes of migration, reunify separated migrant families and rebuild the refugee resettlement program dismantled during the first Trump administration.

Trump also signed presidential actions to:

• Halt refugee admissions for at least four months.
• Prosecute unauthorized immigrants.
• Hold more unauthorized immigrants in detention until they are deported.
• Terminate Biden-era humanitarian parole protections to certain migrants from countries including Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, as well as those vetted at border appointments scheduled with the CBP One smartphone app.
• Continue the wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
• Designate cartels as terrorist organizations.
• Reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy of his first term, which required asylum seekers to await their immigration court hearings outside the U.S.
• Establish new Homeland Security task forces in every state, with local as well as federal law enforcement participation, a move that would challenge California’s sanctuary laws.