On a sweltering August morning in 2025, the legal battle lines between states and the federal government have rarely felt so sharply drawn. New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, at the center of a mounting resistance, is not mincing words about what he sees as a dangerous erosion of state authority and civil rights under former President Donald Trump’s renewed campaign to reshape federal policy. In a pair of recent interviews, Platkin laid out the stakes: from the fate of birthright citizenship to the politicization of funding for crime victims, state attorneys general are fighting on multiple fronts to shield their residents from what they describe as unprecedented federal overreach.
Platkin’s team made headlines this summer when they argued the high-profile birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court. The case, which is still working its way through the lower courts after the Supreme Court rolled back universal injunctions, challenges Trump’s attempt to rewrite the 14th Amendment—a move Platkin says has not been seen since the Civil War. According to Slate, Platkin described the president’s action as a first-of-its-kind effort to deny babies born on U.S. soil their constitutional right to citizenship. “The president attempted for the first time since the Civil War to rewrite the 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution in a way that said babies born on U.S. soil were not in fact entitled to the rights and privileges of United States citizenship,” Platkin explained.
The implications of such a move, he argued, would be devastating for states like New Jersey, where citizenship status determines access to a wide range of benefits—from education to health care and other social services. “The federal government has never made any attempt to say how states could possibly administer this type of new citizenship status they didn’t even bother to define—people who were born here, but were somehow not citizens of another country, but also not citizens of this nation,” Platkin told Slate. The confusion, he warned, would have real human costs. “If you’re an expectant mother in South Jersey... what if I go into labor? Is it really the case that we want to tell those mothers and those families that their children born on U.S. soil, that it depends either on the stroke of a pen of a president or on which state they happen to be in at the time they go into birth? We’ve never treated citizenship like that.”
Platkin’s sense of urgency is not limited to the courtroom. He sees Trump’s actions as part of a broader pattern of disregarding the rights of states to govern themselves. “This administration has fundamentally disregarded the rights and privileges states have to govern themselves within the authority delegated to states under our Constitution,” Platkin said. New Jersey, he noted, has a long tradition of civil rights leadership, boasting the oldest and strongest civil rights law in America—predating the federal Civil Rights Act by two decades. “My office enforces that statute and protects people’s rights. And we do that regularly. But we’re seeing the federal government either engage in a frontal assault on these rights or just pull back from their own enforcement obligations and essentially leave the space open to states.”
Yet, Platkin is quick to point out that not all states are stepping up. He expressed disappointment at the inaction of some of his Republican counterparts. “It is surprising to me and it’s disappointing. Look, I sued the Biden administration. I publicly disagreed with the Biden administration. My job is to protect the people of my state. And if the shoe was on the other foot and this was a Democratic administration doing these types of things... I literally couldn’t sleep at night,” Platkin said, emphasizing the nonpartisan nature of his office’s mission. “And so I think we do really need folks to step up. And I’m proud of the folks that have joined us, the Democratic attorneys general across the country that have been working literally around the clock in our offices.”
But the fight has not stopped at the boundaries of citizenship. In another major legal front, Platkin has joined with 19 other states and Washington, D.C., to sue the Trump administration over what he calls the politicization of the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) funding. As reported by All Rise News, the lawsuit challenges the Justice Department’s decision to condition receipt of nearly $1 billion in funding for crime victims on state compliance with federal immigration policies—policies that often directly conflict with state law in places like New Jersey.
“For 40 years, this has been maybe the least controversial thing the federal government has done,” Platkin said of the VOCA funding, recalling its broad bipartisan support since Ronald Reagan signed it into law. “There’s been no political bickering over it. It had broad bipartisan support, and it had never been weaponized in any way until now.” New Jersey alone receives about $10 million from the fund, which supports emergency shelter, sexual assault forensic exams, medical and funeral expenses, compensation for lost wages, and advocacy services for victims and witnesses.
Platkin recounted a harrowing case that exposed the dangers of the new policy: an undocumented woman, stabbed in the neck during a domestic abuse incident, was detained by immigration authorities while her alleged attacker remained free. “Wait a second, you’re going to let an attempted murderer walk because you’ve detained the victim of a violent crime?” he asked, describing how only a press inquiry led to the woman’s case being resolved. “In New Jersey, we have an immigrant trust directive, and we put these policies into place, by the way, because they’re good for public safety.”
The consequences of these federal actions, Platkin argues, go beyond funding. He pointed to the Justice Department’s prosecution of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and Representative LaMonica McIver, both Democrats, over their oversight of Delaney Hall, an immigration detention center run by the private contractor Geo Group. Baraka’s trespassing case collapsed quickly, but McIver continues to fight her prosecution, which her lawyers allege is selective and vindictive. Politico reported that bodycam footage captured an agent stating, “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general of the United States,” referring to Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney.
Platkin’s concern is not just about the immediate political skirmishes, but about the long-term impact on public safety and the rule of law. “The Department of Justice that has been around for 150 years for a reason, and I’m very concerned about the impact on public safety when you divert all these resources away from core law enforcement purposes of tracking and taking down drug cartels or violent crime gangs or terrorist rings and putting them on nonsense, putting them on nonsense to score political points in a charade,” he said.
As the legal battles rage on, Platkin and his allies are determined to keep fighting for what they see as the bedrock principles of American democracy: equal protection under the law, respect for state sovereignty, and the protection of the most vulnerable. Whether these efforts will succeed in the courts remains to be seen, but the lines have been drawn—and the stakes, as Platkin makes clear, could not be higher.
