Nevada AG Aaron Ford joins lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford is joining 21 other state attorneys general in suing to block an executive order from President Donald Trump that would end birthright citizenship in the United States.

Ford said the executive order “directly offends” the U.S. Constitution, which has protected birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment for more than 150 years.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, decrees that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” In effect, it ensures that anyone born in the United States is a citizen, including those born to immigrant parents.

“Individuals who are stripped of their birthright citizenship lose most basic rights and will live under a threat of deportation,” Ford said at a Tuesday news conference in Las Vegas. “They will lose their ability to obtain a Social Security number and, as they age, to work lawfully. They will lose their right to vote.”

Under Trump’s executive order, one of a slew of decrees the president signed Monday after being sworn in as the nation’s 47th president, children born to a mother who is either undocumented or on a visa and a noncitizen father without a green card would not be U.S. citizens. Nevada has 184,000 undocumented immigrants, according to the American Immigration Council.

The order also affects people legally in the United States on work visas, who are largely concentrated in American cities larger than Las Vegas, according to 2018 data from Pew Research Center.

If the lawsuit can’t get a judge to pause the executive order’s implementation, it will go into effect Feb. 19. It does not retroactively strip citizenship from children and adults who would have been affected by the order.

The executive order, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” directs governmental agencies to stop issuing documents “purporting to recognize United States citizenship” to children affected by the decree once in effect.

Eighteen states, including Nevada, and two cities, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., challenged the order in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, arguing that birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment is “automatic” and that neither the president nor Congress has the constitutional authority to revise it. Four other states filed a second lawsuit in the Western District of Washington.

Carrying out the executive order would significantly harm Nevada, said Ford.

“This order will cause states to lose federal funding for programs that they administer, such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program and foster care and adoption assistance programs, which all in turn are based on the immigration status of the residents being served,” he said.

The executive order argues that the 14th Amendment always “excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof.’ ”

David Orentlicher, a professor at the UNLV Boyd School of Law, said the exception the Trump administration is using has typically been applied to the children of people with diplomatic immunity, such as foreign ambassadors.

The Supreme Court made that exception clear in a 1898 case, said Orentlicher, who is also a Democrat in the Nevada Assembly. He said the attorneys general have a “pretty strong” case against the new administration.

“It’s ironic for this administration that wants to prosecute undocumented immigrants as well as deport them. Clearly, they’re subject to our jurisdiction once they’re in the country,” Orentlicher said.

U.S. Rep. Dina Titus, D-Las Vegas, called the new president’s actions “a violation of the Constitution and our values.”

U.S. Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., also called the executive order unconstitutional, saying in a social media post that “the Constitution is clear: if you are born in the United States, you are an American citizen.”

The amendment nullified the 1857 Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied enslaved Blacks and their children American citizenship. Ford, the Nevada attorney general, said it wasn’t lost on him that Trump issued the order on the national holiday honoring the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It’s also “not lost on me that the same day of his inauguration, one of his closest allies did a Hitler salute,” Ford said, referencing tech billionaire Elon Musk. “These are things that should not be taken in isolation but viewed in the context of where we are today.”