On his first day back in office, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14160, denying birthright citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants and other parents who are not permanent residents. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over the order’s legality. If Trump prevails, the case will fundamentally change American society.

“This is not an academic exercise,” says Matthew Platkin, the former Democratic attorney general of New Jersey, who led a coalition of states in challenging the executive order last year. “The consequences for the people in this country, for our government, both at the federal and state and local levels, and just for the fabric of this nation, would be extraordinary.”

When Platkin challenged the order the day after Trump signed it, practical concerns were top of mind. There is no workable way that the states could implement this order. Starting from the very first question—Who would be a citizen?—and cascading on down to what benefits states and local governments could provide to which people, the order threatened unmitigated chaos.

A Trump victory would unleash harm, not just on immigrants and their children, but on every American.

“States, I can just tell you, are not in a position to parse through someone’s citizenship status,” explains Platkin. “The initial order gave the federal government a 30 day implementation window. This is the federal government that can’t even get TSA lines working at an airport. They’re going to figure out a new class of citizenship in 30 days?” He added: “There would be really immediate and long term and probably irreversible harms to individuals, babies born here, their families, the services they they get, the quality of their lives, disrupted and impacted in ways that we can’t possibly even fathom right now. No one has ever really thought that the government could do this, and then for them to sort of cavalierly go and do it with no plan: massive human consequences.”

The legal question in the case, Trump v. Barbara, is whether the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship applies to the children of undocumented immigrants and people without green cards. And on that legal and historical question, the near universal consensus is that it clearly does. But much less attention has been paid to the harms that a........

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