President Donald Trump holds up a signed executive order in the Oval Office of the White House, Monday, Feb. 3, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Evan Vucci).
A federal judge in Massachusetts on Wednesday refused to lift a ruling preventing the Trump administration from preparing to implement or enforce the president’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.
U.S. District Judge Leo T. Sorokin joined several other federal judges — appointed by presidents from both sides of the political aisle — who have issued nationwide preliminary injunctions on the controversial measure that would potentially upend more than a century of legal precedent.
In a brief three-page order, Sorokin declined to stay his injunction, reasoning that his analysis of the arguments presented on behalf of the plaintiffs — a coalition of Democratic states as well as Washington, D.C. — and those put forth by the Trump administration weighed heavily in favor of the plaintiffs.
“And, as the Court also made clear, this was not a close case,” the judge wrote. “The equitable scale did not tip ever so slightly in the plaintiffs’ direction; the four factors favor the plaintiffs lopsidedly. That was so in the preliminary-injunction analysis, where the plaintiffs bore a high burden of persuasion and decisively satisfied it. If the defendants could not succeed in that context, then they certainly cannot prevail now. On the present motion, the burden shifts to the defendants to establish entitlement to the extraordinary relief they seek, and they have endeavored to meet it primarily by repastinating the same facts and legal theories the Court has already considered and rejected.”
The administration additionally sought to have the court’s universal application of the injunction more narrowly tailored so that it only provided relief to individuals residing in the plaintiff states and members of the organizations who filed the lawsuit last month, but Sorokin declined.
The only new issue raised by the Trump administration in its motion to stay the injunction was the “scope of conduct enjoined” by the order, which also prohibits the government from taking “internal steps relating to” implementation of the measure. Calling the court’s order “overbroad,” the administration asked the Sorokin to limit the injunction to allow the government to begin taking “internal preparatory steps regarding the EO’s application and formulating relevant policies and guidance.”
Sorokin again rejected the request, saying that the government failed to “meaningfully develop” their position, dedicating only a single paragraph to it in the filing.
“For example, the defendants have not identified what ‘internal steps’ they wish to take, but are prevented from taking, by the plain terms of the injunction,” the order states. “Thus, the Court cannot evaluate whether such steps would or should be foreclosed and what harms may flow from their temporary prohibition. When asked at the preliminary injunction hearing about this issue, the defendants’ lawyer was ‘not able to answer questions about implementation.’ On this issue, then, the motion to stay is denied both for failure to specify what changes the defendants propose making to the injunction and because, as the plaintiffs point out, the Executive Order itself contemplates ‘implementation’ within a relatively brief, thirty-day period.”
The administration on Thursday filed a 22-page motion for a stay pending appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, hoping the higher court will be more receptive to its positions.
Trump signed the controversial executive order on his first day in office directing the secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of homeland security, and social security commissioner to cease recognizing citizenship for children whose parents are in the U.S. illegally or in the country on a legal but temporary basis.
The order was met with a flurry of lawsuits from individuals, organizations, and Democratic states, all of which asserted that the order was unconstitutional and contradicted more than 100 years of Supreme Court precedent.
The administration has repeatedly argued that widely-held views of the 14th Amendment granting jus soli (“right of the soil”) citizenship and a landmark 1898 Supreme Court case have been misinterpreted for over 100 years. In fact, the administration’s position is that Trump’s executive order merely enforces already existing law, specifically highlighting the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” contained in the Constitution, which the administration argues is akin to “allegiance” that is “direct,” and “unqualified by allegiance to any alien power.”
Sorokin previously repudiated the administration’s position when issuing the preliminary injunction two weeks ago.
“First, allegiance in the United States arises from the fact of birth,” he wrote in the order. “It does not depend on the status of a child’s parents, nor must it be exclusive, as the defendants contend. Applying the defendants’ view of allegiance would mean children of dual citizens and lawful permanent residents would not be birthright citizens — a result even the defendants do not support.”
The decision made Sorokin the fourth federal judge to issue a nationwide injunction against the birthright citizenship executive order. The other order came from judges in Maryland, New Hampshire, and Washington state.
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