A federal judge in Seattle on Thursday issued a nationwide temporary restraining order halting President Donald Trump’s policy ending a decades-old immigration policy known as “birthright citizenship,” which guarantees that U.S.-born children are citizens regardless of their parents’ status.

The case is separate from the lawsuit filed by 18 states, including Colorado, in the federal district court in Massachusetts. That lawsuit argues that birthright citizenship is “automatic” and that the Constitution does not grant either Congress or the president the powers to alter it as a means of tackling immigration policy issues.

The ruling is the first major salvo in what likely will be a long legal battle over the question of whether the children of individuals unlawfully living in the U.S. are American citizens.    

In the Seattle case, Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour, a Reagan appointee, called the order “blatantly unconstitutional,” echoing the sentiments of Colorado’s Phil Weiser and other states’ attorneys general who filed the separate lawsuit to block the executive order.

“Frankly, I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar could state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order,” Coughenour said.

The judge, who criticized the government’s argument that the 14th Amendment excludes children of immigrants unlawfully living in the U.S., asserted, “President Trump and the federal government now seek to impose a modern version of Dred Scott.”

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown, joined by Oregon, Illinois, and Arizona, led this particular lawsuit, arguing that the order would strip citizenship from around 150,000 newborns annually, including 4,000 in Washington.

In a statement, Weiser told The Denver Gazette that he welcomes the federal judge’s order:

“A federal judge today confirmed that the president’s executive order attempting to override the Constitution and end birthright citizenship is flatly unconstitutional,” he said. “I’m pleased the judge has temporarily stopped the administration from implementing it. We’ll continue pressing our lawsuit to ensure that this unconstitutional executive order is stopped permanently.”

On one side of that argument, Weiser and others maintain that birthright citizenship is a bedrock principle of the U.S. and enshrined in the Constitution, which guarantees citizenship to children born in the U.S., regardless of their parents’ immigration status.

“This is an unconstitutional attempt to redefine what it means to be an American,” Brown of Washington state said, according to the Seattle Times.

On the other side of that argument, some say that the understanding is flawed and a misinterpretation of the Constitution’s “Citizenship Clause,” insisting birthright citizenship has no basis in either the text, the history of the clause or in the political theory underlying it.

Issued Monday, Trump’s executive order zeroed in on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” The administration argued that the Fourteenth Amendment has never been interpreted to “extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States.”

“The Fourteenth Amendment has always excluded from birthright citizenship persons who were born in the United States but not ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof,’” the executive order said.

It excludes the following people from automatic citizenship: individuals whose mothers were not legally in the United States and whose fathers were not U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents; people whose mothers were in the country legally but on a temporary basis — such as on a tourist visa — and whose fathers were not citizens or legal permanent residents.

It goes on to bar federal agencies from recognizing the citizenship of people in those categories.

In his order, Coughenour rejected the federal government’s argument, emphasizing the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that “all persons born or naturalized” in the U.S. are “citizens.”

The judge’s decision is the first in a series of lawsuits nationwide challenging the executive order, setting the stage for a prolonged legal battle that is likely to reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

Within hours of being sworn in on Monday, Trump had unleashed a flurry of executive orders ranging from U.S. foreign aid and trade to demographic diversity and immigration.

Some of Trump’s executive orders are expected to have an immediate impact, while others will likely be challenged with federal lawsuits.

In addition to redefining birthright citizenship, Trump’s executive orders targeted several immigration issues from suspending refugee arrivals and sending more American troops to the border. On the campaign trail, the president promised to crack down on illegal immigration with a mass deportation program he dubbed “Project Aurora.”

In 2022, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that 170,000 immigrants were living without authorization in Colorado. That count does not include the roughly 43,000 immigrants who arrived in metro Denver after illegally crossing the U.S. border with Mexico; transportation receipts suggested that half of them have decided to stay in Colorado.   

Reporter Nico Brambila, Editor Luige del Puerto and the Associated Press contributed to this article.