A District Court Judge based in Seattle called Trump’s executive order halting birthright citizenship “blatantly unconstitutional” and halted it, reports Reuters.
“It just boggles my mind,” Judge John Coughenour said to a Justice Department lawyer defending the president’s order.
Coughenour immediately signed a temporary restraining order until a preliminary hearing could be held to discuss a preliminary injunction, ABC News reported.
The great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark, whose pivotal 1898 Supreme Court case played a key role in establishing birthright citizenship for children of immigrants, also criticized President Donald Trump’s recent executive order to revoke this century-long ruling.
In an interview with NBC, Norman Wong, 74, called Trump’s executive order “troubling” and said it was a move to divide Americans.
The executive order limits birthright citizenship to people with at least one parent who is a United States citizen or a permanent resident.
The EO also mandates that those born to parents in the country legally but temporarily will no longer be guaranteed citizenship. This includes those born from individuals on student, work, or tourist visas.
“He’s feeding off the American mindset, and it’s not a healthy one,” Wong told NBC News. “We can’t build the country together and be against everybody. I think the best thing to do is for Americans to actually be embracing Americans.”
Trump’s precedent comes a century after Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco’s Chinatown, successfully defended his US birthright citizenship in the Supreme Court.
In 1895, Wong returned to the US after visiting China and was prohibited by the US Customs Collector John H. Wise from re-entering. Wong’s status as an American citizen was denied, and Wise, per the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, recognized him as a Chinese national and ordered his deportation.
The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, enacted during a wave of anti-Chinese and xenophobic sentiment, prohibited Chinese labor immigration. Wong’s parents, who were foreign-born but were in the US legally, were not allowed to be naturalized and, in turn, returned to their home country.
However, the 21-year-old fought back alongside the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association. The mutual aid organization filed a writ of habeas corpus, arguing he’d been unconstitutionally detained as a “native-born citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment.”
After a two-year legal battle, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong in a 6-2 vote in 1898.
“The amendment, in clear words and in manifest intent, includes the children born within the territory of the United States of all other persons, of whatever race or color, domiciled within the United States,” Justice Horace Gray wrote in the majority opinion.
He noted that if birthright citizenship was denied, that would in turn “deny citizenship to thousands of persons of English, Scotch, Irish, German, or other European parentage, who have always been considered and treated as citizens of the United States.”
Despite the victory, Wong’s eldest son, Woke Yoke Fun, was detained at Angel Island and later deported in 1911 after immigration authorities were unable to confirm his relation to Wong Kim Ark.
For Norman, his hope for progress lies in the youth, “Our hope is in our children. … the future always belongs to the children…I just hope they do the right thing.”
Trump’s directive has faced intense scrutiny and incited widespread legal action. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Asian Law Caucus have announced suits against the administration. 23 Democratic attorney generals have also filed lawsuits seeking to block Trump’s EO.
“This is a war on American families waged by a president with zero respect for our Constitution. We have sued, and I have every confidence we will win,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said, with NBC.
In a lawsuit filed in Washington, it states that if the measure were enacted nationwide, about 12,000 babies born each month “will no longer be considered United States citizens.” There are an estimated 1.7 million undocumented immigrants from Asia and the Pacific residing in the United States.
The chairs of the Congressional Tri-Caucus—the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—condemned the administration’s order.
“Through the hard-fought legal battle of Wong Kim Ark v the United States in 1898, the Supreme Court upheld that birthright citizenship is a constitutionally protected right, and it is President Trump’s duty, as Commander in Chief of the free world, to uphold the law,” the Tri-Caucus said in the statement.
“We’re going to get the world that we’re willing to fight for,” Norman said with NBC. “It starts in our hearts, what we believe … If we have good thoughts and work from that, we’ll get a better world. But it’s not going to be easy in this country.”
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