An Eye on the Golden Dome: Dispatches from the State Capitol

by Hank Lacey and Lincoln Roch

Update: Feb. 15, 2025, 9:46 pm

Attorney general Phil Weiser and attorneys general from 17 other states and the District of Columbia obtained on Feb. 5 a preliminary injunction that blocks President Donald Trump’s executive order that purports to strip children of immigrant who are born in the U.S. of American citizenship.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington invoked a late 19th century ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rejected an effort by the federal government then to attempt a similar rescission of American citizenship. In that 1898 case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the high court faced an argument that a child of a Chinese immigrant who was born in California was not a citizen. The justices confirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment, adopted after the Civil War, enshrined the right to citizenship to all persons born in the United States.

“The Citizenship Clause is clear,” Coughenour wrote, referring to section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment. “[A]ny person who is born in the territorial United States or properly naturalized according to federal procedures is a citizen of this country.”

Weiser said in a Feb. 13 statement that Trump’s behavior is at odds with his oath to uphold the Constitution.

“President Trump may believe that he is above the law, but today’s preliminary injunction sends a clear message,” Weiser said. “He is not a king, and he cannot rewrite the Constitution with the stroke of a pen.”

Another federal judge in Maryland has also blocked Trump’s citizenship executive order from taking effect, as have U.S. district judges in Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

— Hank Lacey