ACLU challenges Trump’s new orders on birthright citizenship

Aug. 11 (UPI) — The American Civil Liberties Union on Tuesday challenged President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to stop birthright citizenship.

On Thursday, Trump signed two executive orders against the constitutionally protected right a little more than a month after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against his attempts to overturn it.

The first order expanded who would be denied automatic guaranteed citizenship to include “alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments.”

The second would ban “birth tourism,” which is already illegal because it requires the person to get a visa with fraud. The practice is when a traveler enters a country to give birth there to ensure citizenship.

The ACLU’s case asks a federal judge to clarify the unconstitutionality of the executive orders.

The ACLU isn’t filing a new lawsuit. Instead, it’s asking the original judge that ruled in his favor to rule that Trump can’t deny citizenship to anyone covered by that clblock-action lawsuit.

“To avoid any doubt in this regard, the Court should underscore that the government may not strip away clblock members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed blockertions of Executive power over birthright citizenship,” the motion to clarify said.

“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” Cody Wofsy, lead counsel on the case and deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”

Trump’s original order that was ruled unconstitutional would have denied citizenship to babies without at least one parent with U.S. citizenship or permanent legal status.

The motion also asked to speed the process of returning the case back to the original courtroom where U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante made the ruling. It hasn’t been sent back to the appeals court yet. When it is, it will be sent back to Laplante’s court in New Hampshire.