Legal Groups That Secured Supreme Court Birthright Victory Move to Protect Babies From Trump’s Latest Attacks on Citizenship

CONCORD, N.H. — The ACLU of Maine and other advocates today asked a federal court to make it unquestionably clear that the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Barbara applies to the president’s August 6 executive order once again targeting birthright citizenship.

In a major victory, the Supreme Court ruled that neither the president nor Congress can end birthright citizenship, blocking a failed Trump executive order from January 2025.

However, the president signed a new executive order last week again targeting birthright citizenship and flying in the face of the Court’s ruling, which confirmed that the Constitution’s Citizenship Clause puts “the question of citizenship ‘once and forever [to] rest.’”

The organizations that successfully argued Barbara are now asking a federal court to make it unquestionably clear that the citizenship of babies covered by that class-action lawsuit is protected despite this new executive order. The legal groups wrote: “The Supreme Court confirmed that there are no additional exceptions beyond those recognized in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649 (1898), and the Fourteenth Amendment is not subject to executive (or legislative) revision. President Trump’s continued resistance to that principle calls for this Court’s renewed intervention.”

The motion was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Hampshire, where the lawsuit was first filed, by the ACLU of Maine, ACLU, ACLU of New Hampshire, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund.

“The Supreme Court reaffirmed the plain language of the Constitution in June, making it clear that neither the president nor Congress can end birthright citizenship,” said ACLU of Maine Executive Director Molly Curren Rowles. “We’ll continue defending the Constitution and the core principles reflected in the 14th Amendment: that with few exceptions, every baby born on U.S. soil is a U.S. citizen.”

“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,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”

Read the motion here or in the PDF at the bottom of this page.