When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a single federal judge could not issue a nationwide injunction on a case related to the constitutional right of birthright citizenship that the Trump administration is trying to end, the justices made an exception for class action cases. OK, so now a New Hampshire federal judge has certified a nationwide class action on the same matter.

We hope this blocks President Donald Trump’s attempt to terminate the long-standing right to birthright citizenship. The administration had tried to argue that the plaintiffs had no standing given that the children were not born yet a ridiculous claim given that the effects would apply immediately at the moment of their birth.

At no point throughout this entire fiasco has the government ever tried to substantiate how it would suffer any irreparable harm from maintaining the status quo that has been in place for well more than a century.

Its argument boils down to the idea that the executive should be able to override not only Congress but the Supreme Court and the Constitution itself, whose 14th Amendment is quite unambiguous in a way that has not only been ruled on already by the high court, but understood by the entirety of legal academia in the interim.

Meanwhile, it is extraordinarily clear that there would be catastrophic and cascading harms resulting from the policy going to effect. Every individual born to undocumented or temporary resident parents under this regime could be effectively stateless in their own country of birth, causing them extraordinary difficulty from birth and significantly impacting the states and localities where they live.

This is an argument that the MAGA wing seems to understand otherwise, as hyper-conservative states like Texas continuously sued the Biden administration over the many supposed ills caused by undocumented immigrants in their jurisdictions.

Yet, Trump is now insisting that he has the right to violate the Constitution in a way that will produce many more legally undocumented immigrants in every state in the nation. Not to mention that it would be an entirely unworkable paradigm to have certain states covered by a judicial injunction, while others see the policy go into effect, meaning certain people could be considered native-born U.S. citizens in one state and not another.

Could someone with a U.S. birth certificate and passport be detained by immigration agents if they were to cross a state line, because they would then be considered stateless and subject to deportation? That is the type of question that we should not endeavor to hash out.

The president has frequently couched this effort in the language of carrying out a popular mandate and the will of the public, yet the public is not on board; recent polls show that support for immigration and the contributions it brings to the nation are only growing, while views on Trump and Stephen Miller‘s xenophobic nationalist crackdown or souring.

A federal judge last week also blocked the administration’s “roving patrols” of immigration agents, finding what we all can clearly see: these are rife with racial profiling and due process violations.

That’s not what America is supposed to be about. We hope that this back-and-forth ends soon with the most definitive statement the courts could make: attempts to end birthright citizenship are unconstitutional on the merits, full stop.

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