• A federal judge has temporarily blocked President Donald Trump's order to end birthright citizenship.
• The order has been challenged by multiple lawsuits that say it violates the 14th Amendment.
• In temporarily halting the order, the Seattle judge called it "blatantly unconstitutional."

A federal judge in Seattle temporarily halted President Donald Trump's controversial executive order to deny automatic citizenship for some people born on US soil, calling the move to end birthright citizenship "blatantly unconstitutional."

"I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that is a constitutional order," Judge John Coughenour of the US District Court for the Western District of Washington told the Trump administration's attorneys after hearing arguments Thursday morning, according to multiple news outlets in the courtroom. "It boggles my mind."

"I've been on the bench for over four decades. I can't remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one is," the judge added.

The ruling was made in a case brought by four states — Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon. The case is among at least five lawsuits filed this week challenging Trump's birthright-citizenship order on the grounds that it violates the 14th Amendment.

A spokesperson for the Justice Department told Business Insider in a statement that the law enforcement agency "will vigorously defend President Trump's EO, which correctly interprets the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."

"We look forward to presenting a full merits argument to the Court and to the American people, who are desperate to see our Nation's laws enforced," the spokesperson said.

In the judge's ruling granting a 14-day restraining order, Coughenour wrote: "There is a strong likelihood that Plaintiffs will succeed on the merits of their claims that the Executive Order violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Immigration and Nationality Act."

On Tuesday, attorneys general from 22 states and two cities across the country filed two separate lawsuits to block the order. A hearing has not yet been held for the first suit, which 18 states and the top law-enforcement officers of Washington, DC, and San Francisco have joined.

The lawsuit filed by the attorneys general of Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon says the president "has no authority to amend the Constitution or supersede the Citizenship Clause's grant of citizenship to individuals born in the United States." It adds: "Nor is he empowered by any other constitutional provision or law to determine who shall or shall not be granted United States citizenship at birth."

The lawsuit also says: "United States citizens are entitled to a broad array of rights and benefits as a result of their citizenship. Withholding citizenship or stripping individuals of their citizenship will result in an immediate and irreparable harm to those individuals and to the Plaintiff States."

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

Birthright citizenship is a policy that automatically gives citizenship to anyone born in the US or US territories. Under Trump's executive order, federal agencies would be banned from issuing any documents granting citizenship to US-born children whose parents live in the country illegally, or in cases in which the mother was lawfully in the country temporarily — such as a student or tourist — but the father is neither a US citizen nor a lawful permanent resident.

The American Civil Liberties Union also brought a lawsuit on Monday that says at least 150,000 children would be affected.

Other immigration executive orders Trump signed after he was sworn in involved declaring a national emergency, sending the military to the US-Mexico border, shutting down the CBP One app from which immigrants seeking asylum could submit information, and restricting federal funding to sanctuary cities — which have limited cooperation with agents working to deport immigrants in the US illegally.

White House principal deputy press secretary Harrison Fields told BI in a statement on Wednesday that the Trump administration is prepared to fight back against the lawsuits targeting his executive orders.

"Radical Leftists can either choose to swim against the tide and reject the overwhelming will of the people, or they can get on board and work with President Trump to advance his wildly popular agenda," Fields said. "These lawsuits are nothing more than an extension of the Left's resistance — and the Trump Administration is ready to face them in court."

• 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.