Washington Attorney General Nick Brown suing Trump administration over birthright citizenship

President Donald Trump was in office for only 24 hours before the state of Washington sued his administration.

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, himself in office for only a week, was set to give details of a lawsuit against the Trump administration Tuesday morning to block the president’s executive order seeking to overturn birthright citizenship.

Brown has scheduled an 11 a.m. news conference in Seattle and says he will file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Western Washington “challenging President Donald Trump’s unconstitutional executive order on birthright citizenship.”

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.'”

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, 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.”

David Gutman: 206-464-2926 or dgutman@seattletimes.com.