Group Changes Strategy After Supreme Court Ruling, Seeks to Convert to Class Action Suit

Just a few hours after the Supreme Court ruled against them, CASA, Inc., the organization representing immigrants opposed to President Donald Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, altered its strategy and filed another suit in the same District Court, this time submitting their complaint as a class action.

“The Supreme Court’s recent stay opinion acknowledges that courts may award injunctive relief beyond the named parties when the case is brought as a class action,” the plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote to the District Court of Maryland.

They cited Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s comment that district-level federal courts could still “grant or deny the functional equivalent of a universal injunction—for example, by granting or denying a preliminary injunction to a putative nationwide class.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor also mentioned class action in her dissent.

“Consistent with the Supreme Court’s instructions, Plaintiffs have now filed an amended complaint that expressly seeks relief on behalf of a putative class of those U.S.-born babies wrongfully deemed by the Executive Order to be ineligible for U.S. citizenship, along with their parents,” they wrote.

Attorneys for the plaintiffs appeared focused on securing an expedient result from the District Court of Maryland, requesting that the court immediately enter a temporary restraining order without any further briefing, and then afterward allow the defendants one week to file an opposing brief.

“The Court has already addressed the preliminary injunction factors and determined that a preliminary injunction is warranted, and the Court should not reconsider that reasoning now,” the plaintiffs argued, adding that the briefings “should be limited to what objections, if any, Defendants have to class-wide preliminary injunctive relief.”

Meanwhile, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Hampshire, ACLU of Maine, ACLU of Massachusetts, Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund filed their own class action lawsuit in the District of New Hampshire on behalf of the proposed class of babies and parents who could be affected by Trump’s executive order.

Requesting their own injunctive relief based on the Supreme Court’s decision, the ACLU plaintiffs argued that the order violated the 14th Amendment and that anybody born in the United States should be granted citizenship. The ACLU plaintiffs named three individual plaintiffs in their complaint.

Both complaints list Trump as a defendant. The ACLU plaintiffs also list as defendants the secretaries of the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Department of Agriculture and the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, but they list only Trump by name.

The Epoch Times has reached out to the White House for comment on these new lawsuits.