WA AG Nick Brown sues Trump administration over birthright citizenship

Washington, led by new Attorney General Nick Brown, has sued President Donald Trump and his administration over their order to end birthright citizenship.

Trump, on his first day in office, issued an executive order to overturn birthright citizenship, a right recognized as enshrined in the Constitution by more than a century of legal precedent.

Brown’s lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Western Washington and joined by Arizona, Illinois and Oregon, argues that Trump’s order is “contrary to the plain terms” of the Constitution.

“The President has no authority to amend the Constitution or supersede the Citizenship Clause’s grant of citizenship to individuals born in the United States,” Brown wrote.

Brown’s is one of a flurry of lawsuits to immediately challenge Trump’s order on birthright citizenship. Eighteen states, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco sued the Trump administration in federal court in Massachusetts. The American Civil Liberties Union and several immigrants rights groups filed a lawsuit Monday night in federal court in New Hampshire to block the executive order.

Brown, at a Tuesday news conference in Seattle, said Trump’s order was “an attempt to redefine what it means to be an American” and called it “unconstitutional, un-American and cruel.”

“On Monday, one man, the president, said that the citizenship of millions of Americans born to immigrants in this country means less, that the children of immigrants born into citizenship don’t have as much value in this country as others,” Brown said. “He is wrong.”

He said he filed separately from the larger group of other states because there are “specific and unique harms” to Washington from ending birthright citizenship. He also said that having multiple cases challenging the order is a good thing, “to demonstrate to courts all across the United States the harm in those specific communities.”

Birthright citizenship — the idea that every person born in the United States is an American citizen — dates to at least 1868, when it was spelled out in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the right, ruling 6-2 that a child born in the United States to Chinese immigrant parents was a U.S. citizen.

Trump’s executive order, issued Monday, says the government will not issue documents such as passports to someone if their mother was illegally in the country and their father was not a citizen or permanent resident, or if their mother was here legally, but only temporarily.

The first line of the 14th Amendment reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

Trump’s executive order reads the line differently from more than a century of legal precedent.

“The Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” Trump’s executive order says. “The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’”

Andrew Siegel, a professor of constitutional law at Seattle University School of Law, said the argument doesn’t make sense.

“People who are in this country without legal permission are subject to the jurisdiction of this country,” Siegel said. “They can be sued, they can be arrested, they can be charged with crimes, they can be policed in the same way as anybody else.”

Trump’s order, Siegel said, is “blatantly in conflict with existing Supreme Court precedent and what was, until recently, the unanimous reading of the 14th Amendment by experts.”

“They definitely want to tee this issue up for the Supreme Court and think that there is some possibility they might prevail,” he said. “They also, I think, think that they can score political points and move the conversation and set things up for smaller constitutional changes later.”

The order is part of a promised immigration crackdown from Trump, including mass deportations and other executive orders to halt refugee resettlement and declare a national emergency on the southern border.

Brown’s lawsuit says that in 2022 about 153,000 children were born in the U.S. who could be stripped of citizenship due to Trump’s order, including about 4,000 in Washington.

“The individuals who are stripped of their United States citizenship will be rendered undocumented, subject to removal or detention, and many will be stateless — that is, citizens of no country at all,” Brown wrote. “Despite the Constitution’s guarantee of their citizenship, thousands of newborns and children will lose their ability to fully and fairly be a part of American society as a citizen with all its benefits and privileges.”

Brown on Monday night called Trump’s suite of first-day executive orders “gravely concerning” and referred to several, including the attack on birthright citizenship, as “not only unconstitutional on their face, but simply un-American.”

“The Attorney General’s Office has spent the last year preparing for this day,” Brown wrote. “Our team has worked closely with colleagues in other states, studied Project 2025 and other documents, and researched case law in order to act swiftly.”

Brown, who has been in office less than a week, credited former Attorney General and now Gov. Bob Ferguson for preparing for a possible flurry of litigation in response to the early days of the Trump administration.

Brown on Tuesday said his team is reviewing other executive orders filed by Trump, but that he doesn’t expect to “show up here every other day” to announce a lawsuit.

The president, he said, has wide power, and actions that he personally disagrees with can be perfectly legal.

“I am personally offended by the pardoning of 1,500 people that stormed our Capitol, that assaulted law enforcement and that plainly violated the law,” he said, referring to Trump’s broad pardon of nearly all involved in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. “I think that is a travesty of justice, it doesn’t mean that we should sue about it.”