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Published on January 22, 2025
Legal Mayhem Unleashed as Arizona Fights Back Against Trump's Explosive Bid to End Birthright CitizenshipSource: Wikipedia/Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, Please attribute to Gage Skidmore if used elsewhere., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Just days into his latest term, President Donald Trump sparked a legal showdown over an executive order that seeks to scrap birthright citizenship, a policy woven into the fabric of American society since the aftermath of the Civil War. In an aggressively swift counter, Arizona and several other states have mounted challenges to the order's constitutionality. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes proclaimed at a recent press conference that "Birthright citizenship has allowed America to become the vibrant and dynamic home to families from all corners of this planet," as reported by FOX 10 Phoenix.

Arizona's legal strategy includes a lawsuit filed jointly with Washington, Illinois, and Oregon in a Washington state federal court, and a similar action taken by another group of 18 states, San Francisco, and Washington D.C. in a Massachusetts federal court. The collective assertion is that the executive order, which would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to parents without U.S. citizenship or legal status starting February 19, stretches beyond the powers of the executive branch, as AZ Mirror details. Attorney General Mayes criticized the president, asserting, "No president can unilaterally change the constitution on a whim."

Both lawsuits emphasize the weighty historical precedent supporting birthright citizenship. First established by the 14th Amendment, the concept has been cemented by a chain of legal interpretations over more than a century and a half. Challenging the notion that Trump's executive order oversteps its authority, the suits highlight the burdensome implications for state-managed services, which rely on federal funding tethered to citizen counts, and the potential chaos in state government functions that birthright citizenship change could trigger.

Alarm has also been raised over the potential hazards to Arizona's healthcare and voter registration systems. Birth certificates are fundamental documents used frequently by citizens. According to AZ Mirror, the chief reporting officer and assistant state registrar of ADHS, Krystal Colburn, pointed out that "it is currently impossible to determine a parent’s legal status from a birth certificate," an essential item for obtaining various legal documentation. Mayes also questioned, without a system in place to ascertain parental citizenship at hospitals, how this order will implicate the issuance of birth certificates and by extension, the voter registration process that rests heavily upon them.

The legal fracas occurs in the backdrop of an election where Arizona voters seemed to align more with stringent immigration policies. Despite this, Mayes stated in an interview obtained by AZ Mirror that "I don’t think voters voted to undo birthright citizenship. This is a bizarre attempt to undermine 150 years of jurisprudence." Whether the legal battle will sway the Supreme Court, which has leaned more conservative, to uphold decades of precedent or forge a new path remains uncertain.