18 states sued to block Trump's push to end birthright citizenship — which could impact hundreds of thousands of children each year

• Eighteen states sued to block Donald Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship.
• The lawsuit claims Trump's order violates the 14th Amendment.
• Ending birthright citizenship could affect thousands of US-born children.

Attorneys general from 18 states, along with the top law enforcement officers of Washington, DC, and San Francisco, sued President Donald Trump on Tuesday to block his executive order to end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.

Trump's move to abolish birthright citizenship — a policy that guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil — is a "flagrantly unlawful attempt to strip hundreds of thousands American-born children of their citizenship based on their parentage," the lawsuit alleges.

The lawsuit, filed in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts, says that the "principle of birthright citizenship has been enshrined in the Constitution for more than 150 years" and that Trump's order "expressly violates" the 14th Amendment.

Trump's order targeting birthright citizenship, titled "Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," was signed shortly after Trump was sworn into office for a second presidential term on Monday. It is scheduled to take effect 30 days after its signing.

Under the order, federal agencies are barred from issuing documents recognizing the citizenship of babies born in the US to parents who are in the country unlawfully or in cases where the mother was in the country legally, but temporarily, and the father was not a US citizen or lawful permanent resident.

"President Trump's public statements make clear that he wishes to end birthright citizenship purely as a policy tactic to purportedly deter immigration to the United States," the lawsuit says. "Despite a President's broad powers to set immigration policy, however, the Citizenship Stripping Order falls far outside the legal bounds of the President's authority."

The lawsuit, filed by the group of states which includes New Jersey, New York, California, and Massachusetts, adds that if the "unprecedented executive action" moves forward, "both Plaintiffs and their residents will suffer immediate and irreparable harm."

"Every year, thousands of children are born in Plaintiffs' jurisdictions to parents who lack legal status or have a lawful status on a temporary basis," the lawsuit says.

The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment by Business Insider on Tuesday.

The executive order, if put into effect, would likely impact thousands of children in every corner of the US. The ACLU lawsuit brought on Monday, similar to the attorneys general suit, said that at least 150,000 children whose parents lacked legal status would not receive citizenship.

Using data from the 2022 American Community Survey, the most recently available data, the Pew Research Center calculated that among the 22 million people in households with an immigrant living in the US illegally, 1.3 million are adults born in the US to such immigrants.

Additionally, Pew found that about 4.4 million people under the age of 18 who were born in the US live with a parent living in the US illegally. Over 8% of households in Nevada, California, New Jersey, and Texas are inhabited by at least one immigrant in the US illegally.

Future generations of children could be substantially impacted by the abolition of birthright citizenship. A Pew analysis from 2018 using 2016 Census data found that about 6% of births that year were to immigrant parents living in the US illegally, or about 250,000 babies. This was down from about 390,000 babies in 2007 but still significantly higher than 30,000 in 1980.

When expanding the scope to foreign-born mothers, about 843,200 births in 2023 were to foreign-born mothers, or about 24% of all births, per the Annie E. Casey Foundation. This percentage is relatively in line with the past two decades.

The executive order targeting birthright citizenship was joined by other immigration- and deportation-oriented executive orders including declaring a national emergency, removing the CBP One app allowing migrants to submit information to seek asylum, and instructing federal agencies to select countries from which to suspend migrants if their governments fail to provide detailed information about their citizens.