Illinois Sues Over Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Order as Pritzker Says No Word on Raids Targeting Chicago


Video: The WTTW News Spotlight Politics team on the day’s biggest stories. (Produced by Andrea Guthmann)


Illinois is suing to block President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, while state leaders brace for potential raids aimed at removing individuals in the U.S. without legal documentation.

The swift moves by local elected officials to push back against the Trump administration’s early actions around immigration policy come just over 24 hours after the president was sworn in for a second term.

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Federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials could be targeting as many as 2,000 Chicagoans, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said.

“I don’t know whether they’ll effectuate that or how,” Pritzker said.

But Pritzker also said Tuesday that Trump’s new administration has had zero communication with his office about ICE’s plans.

Pritzker on Monday immediately condemned as unconstitutional and said Illinois would therefore not follow the executive order Trump signed shortly after being sworn in that seeks to end the longstanding practice that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, regardless of the baby’s parents’ legal status.

The lawsuit announced by Attorney General Kwame Raoul on Tuesday said residents of Illinois and other states party to the suit will “suffer immediate and irreparable harm” if Trump’s order is allowed to stand, given that in Illinois in 2022, there “were approximately 9,100 United States citizen children born to mothers who lacked legal status and approximately 5,200 United States citizen children born to two parents who lacked legal status.”

The suit cites the 14th Amendment – which begins with the clause “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” – and said that Trump “has no authority to amend the Constitution.”

Illinois wants a federal court to immediately block the order from taking effect.

Raoul, who talks about being the son of immigrants from Haiti, said in a statement that children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents are entitled to U.S. citizenship.

“We need to discuss bipartisan commonsense immigration reforms, but denying birthright citizenship, which dates back centuries and has been upheld twice by the U.S. Supreme Court, is not the solution,” he said.

Illinois teamed up with Arizona, Oregon and Washington to file the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Separately, 18 states as well as San Francisco and Washington D.C. filed a federal suit in Massachusetts over the birthright citizenship executive order.

State Rep. Theresa Mah, D-Chicago, said as a “birthright baby” born to parents who came to America from China who now represents primarily immigrant communities in Chinatown and Pilsen, she’s concerned and outraged about the impact of the order and the threat of raids alike.

“They’re terrorizing my communities,” Mah said. “And it’s going to rip families apart. These are law-abiding citizens who, you know, go to work, who go to school. You know, what we want is stability. These are folks who contribute to our economy. The city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, is economically strong and vibrant because of the contributions of these immigrants, regardless of their status.”

Mah is part of a group of a couple dozen community leaders sharing live updates about immigration action on Signal, an app that encrypts messages.

Immigrants who are seeking asylum or are otherwise in the U.S. without appropriate legal status are not committing crimes, Mah said.

Pritzker, as he’s taken to doing in recent public appearances, was vocal that any undocumented immigrants convicted of violent crimes should be deported.

“That is the law of the United States and has been for quite a long time. I don’t want them in my state, I don’t want them in my country,” he said.

He said the majority of undocumented immigrants are paying taxes but don’t receive services in return.

“We should think very carefully about what immigration means to this country. It is what were founded upon,” Pritzker said as he called for Congress and Trump to pass comprehensive reform rather than a president who is “scaring people, forcing them out of their jobs because they’re afraid to go to work.”

Pritzker said businesses he visited in Little Village and Pilsen on the day of Trump’s inauguration were “relatively empty” because residents are afraid.

The lack of information from Trump officials about potential ICE action is “just more evidence of the chaos and confusion that they’re trying to sow” Pritzker said in response to reporters’ questions after an unrelated press conference.

“It’s very disappointing,” the Democratic governor said.

Trump’s immigration czar Tom Homan has said ICE agents would carry out mass raids in Chicago first but walked that back after media reports the blitz would begin the day after Trump’s inauguration.

“Chicago’s in trouble because your mayor sucks and your governor sucks,” Homan said, according to multiple media reports, when he was the featured guest in December at a Republican party in Chicago. “We’re going to start right here in Chicago, Illinois. If your Chicago mayor doesn’t want to help, he can step aside.”

He also last week said in an interview on Fox News that Chicago would be among the first cities for raids.

But after widespread reporting the raids would begin Tuesday, Homan told the Washington Post that leaked information about the planned raids would endanger ICE agents so those plans were off, and that he didn’t know why there was such immense focus on Chicago given that the raids would be carried out all over the U.S.

Republican state Rep. Dan Ugaste, of Geneva, called on Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson to cooperate with ICE.

“The safety of our residents is paramount, and allowing federal officials to remove criminals from jails instead of neighborhoods would make much more sense and could possibly save lives,” Ugaste said. “We need to change course immediately, and we have allowed undocumented criminals to jeopardize the safety of Illinois citizens for way too long.”

Illinois and Chicago have laws that forbid state and local police from cooperating with federal agents on immigration detention operations, and from detaining anyone based solely on their immigration status.

Johnson, like Pritzker, has said Chicago will defend the immigrant population.

The Illinois Republican Party put out a release calling Pritzker “another grandstanding, sanctimonious Democrat” and said that his concern about unconstitutional actions is hypocritical given that Pritzker has signed state laws that judges have found to be unconstitutional, either in whole or in part.

The release cited Illinois’ ban on the sale of high-capacity guns and magazines, which a federal judge ruled is a breach of the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to bear arms, but which is still in place because a higher-level appeals court found there’s enough legal basis behind the law to keep it temporarily in place until the court can complete a wholescale review.

Also during Tuesday’s exchange with reporters, Pritzker—a billionaire heir to the Hyatt fortune—called it “frightening” that “some of the wealthiest people in the country” had prime seats at Trump’s inauguration.

“Trump feels better about having them around than having ordinary Americans backing him up or standing with him,” Pritzker said

“It’s just an indication of what this administration was really about,” he said, “effectuating policies that are either good for him personally and enrich him personally, or his family, or are good for his friends and allies, but bad for anyone else in the country.”

Pritzker said that while Trump campaigned to bring down inflation, none of the flood of executive orders the president immediately signed will lower costs.

Instead, Pritzker said, Trump’s promised tariffs against Canada and Mexico will increase grocery prices.


 

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