A few weeks before Donald Trump was sworn back into the White House, San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu checked in with an old friend.

Chiu and California Attorney General Rob Bonta had worked closely together when both were in the Legislature. And they continued to stay in touch in the years since, despite their busy new jobs.

During the conversation, Chiu told Bonta that his office was planning to challenge any effort by Trump to restrict birthright citizenship.

Was Bonta’s office interested in doing the same?

It was. In fact, several lawyers in the Attorney General’s Office were already preparing their own legal case with counterparts in other states.

Chiu and his staff were added to the team.

On Jan. 20, Trump signed an executive order saying that children of undocumented parents would not be eligible for citizenship. Less than 24 hours later, Chiu, Bonta and attorneys general in 17 more states filed a lawsuit calling it “flagrantly unlawful.”

Their quick response has helped prompt the first of what could be multiple debates in the U.S. Supreme Court over the order. So far, federal judges have not let it go into effect. But the high court is currently considering a request by the Trump administration to allow that to happen, at least in some states. A response to that appeal was filed with the court on Friday afternoon.

If the order never goes into effect in California, it will be due in part to months of behind-the-scenes planning well before Inauguration Day.

“Everyone knew he was going to do it,” Bonta said of the order. “The question wasn’t whether, it was when.”

Birthright citizenship promise

Almost two years ago, Trump made a pledge.

“As part of my plan to secure the border on day one of my new term in office, I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law, going forward, the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” he said in campaign video released in May 2023.

Months before the November election, Bonta’s office began preparing for the actions Trump could take if he was reelected president. The birthright citizenship order was on their list.

A small group of lawyers in California’s civil rights enforcement division began researching legal cases on the issue and thinking through what a future order could say.

“We put the pieces on the board to try to be ready to counter whatever they did,” said Michael Newman, a senior assistant attorney general who leads the civil rights section.

One case the team reviewed was a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1898.

Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who were living in the United States and continued to do so for many years. In 1890, Ark’s parents moved back to China. He stayed in America.

Years later, Ark went to visit them and returned to the United States in 1895. But he was denied entry back into the country on the grounds that he wasn’t a citizen.

The 14th Amendment says that all people born or naturalized in the country “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” are citizens . But the Chinese Exclusion Act was also in place. It banned Chinese laborers from coming to America and prevented state and federal courts from granting citizenship to residents who were Chinese.

So was Ark a citizen even though he was born to parents who weren’t?

A majority of the Supreme Court said he was.

Chiu was well aware of that history when he had the conversation with Bonta. His office had also started its own legal review of the issue before the election.

“The story of birthright citizenship is as San Francisco as they come,” Chiu said.

Once Trump was elected, Chiu determined that his office was going to sue if he tried to restrict birthright citizenship — even if Bonta and other attorneys general didn’t plan to.

Watching Trump’s orders

Shortly after the election, attorneys in Bonta’s office had already begun preparing a draft of a lawsuit with counterparts in other states. Bonta was also speaking regularly with Democratic attorneys general.

Chiu said he and his team were “deeply engaged in conversations” once they joined the case.

“These were phone calls late at night, early in the morning, on the weekends. We were all hands on deck.”

Bonta said his first call with attorneys general on Inauguration Day occurred in the morning after he addressed a Martin Luther King Jr. event in Sacramento. Trump had just taken the oath of office.

The attorneys asked each other: What were they seeing and hearing?

Bonta recalled that there were indications Trump would sign the birthright citizenship order later that day. But what would it say?

It wasn’t clear at the time. And it wasn’t even known when Trump signed it in the Oval Office around 4:45 p.m. California time.

For roughly an hour after that, Newman and other attorneys refreshed and searched the White House website for the text before it appeared.

It said the United States would no longer provide citizenship to babies of mothers who were “unlawfully present in the United States” and of fathers who were not citizens or a “lawful permanent resident.” It also would not grant it for newborns of mothers with “lawful but temporary” immigration statuses and fathers who were not citizens or permanent residents.

The order said the changes would go into effect in 30 days.

During a call that evening around 9 p.m., Bonta talked through the order with the attorneys in his office that were closely following it.

“We just turned on the green light and said: ‘Execute the plan,’” he said.

The work continued through the night.

‘Did not sleep’

It also did for lawyers across the country.

“My team, at least several members of it, did not sleep,” said New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin. His office is one of the lead agencies on the case, along with California and Massachusetts.

Newman said attorneys on his team in California were going back and forth with lawyers across the country, refining arguments, collecting signed documents and preparing the lawsuit to be filed in court. It argues that the executive order would deny citizenship for roughly 24,500 children a year in California and that the state would lose tens of millions of dollars annually in federal reimbursements.

They kept working until about 6:30 a.m.

“For everything that we were preparing for, we hoped that it wouldn’t be actually implemented,” Bonta said, “and that we could put our preparation on a shelf and let it gather dust.”

Instead, the lawsuit was filed a few hours later in Massachusetts federal court.

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