Four states suing the Trump administration to defend the citizenship of illegal aliens and a nonsense definition of “birthright citizenship” do no have any evidence to prove the “harm” they claim in the lawsuit, according to records obtained by America First Legal (AFL).
On his first day in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order, “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” which recognizes the only sane understanding of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause: that it does not apply to the entire globe’s worth of people just because they happen to be born on American soil. Put simply, a child born to aliens within the United States does not automatically become a citizen of the United States.
According to the states’ lawsuit, Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon are concerned that if anchor babies’ citizenships are no longer recognized, they will be “harmed” by the loss of “federal funding or reimbursements to programs that the Plaintiff States administer, such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), foster care and adoption assistance programs, and programs to facilitate streamlined issuances of SSNs [Social Security Numbers] to eligible babies — among others.”
In other words, they are concerned that they will lose federal funding to give tax dollars meant for American citizens to individuals who should never have been considered citizens in the first place, and who must be returned to their noncitizen status.
AFL filed public records requests with the plaintiff states to see if they had the data or records to prove their own claims. Not one did.
“America First Legal tested whether several plaintiff states challenging the President’s birthright citizenship executive order actually suffered the harm they alleged: that they would have to spend more money on children deemed noncitizens because the federal government would no longer be covering costs,” AFL Vice President Dan Epstein said in a statement. “The evidence either did not exist or was simply not something the states monitored. Suing a presidential Administration without a concrete injury is an abuse of the courts and the justice system. States must do their homework before running to court with allegations lacking evidentiary support.”
When AFL reached out via public records request to prove their claims with actual data, Arizona’s Department of Education replied, saying it “does not compile or aggregate data in a manner that can fulfill your request. We conducted a thorough search of our database and did not find any relevant information.”
Oregon’s Health Authority said, “There are no responsive records to your request for records reflecting ‘all expenditures from January 1, 2022, through August 1, 2025, used to provide services to children born to mothers who lacked a lawful immigration status in the United States or children where both parents lacked a lawful immigration status in the United States.’”
The Department of Human Services in Illinois said, “The Department does not independently track the requested information for the Home Visiting Program, the Early Intervention (EI) Program, or the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP),” adding, “there are no responsive records showing total payouts to undocumented persons . . . for Cash or SNAP benefits . . . [and that] immigration status for the parent is not part of the eligibility determination and is therefore not collected on the application” for the state’s summer electronic benefits transfter program.
Illinois’s Department of Healthcare and Family Services similarly replied that it has no records, and Washington’s Healthcare Authority said it also has no records.
Hellbound and Down 