A federal judge in Seattle has once again blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to rescind birthright citizenship — the guarantee embedded in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that every person born in the U.S. is an American citizen.

Senior U.S. District Judge John Coughenour was withering Thursday in his criticism of President Donald Trump’s executive order, as he granted a preliminary injunction to prevent it from taking effect nationwide. Coughenour’s injunction blocks Trump’s order from taking effect until the court case ends, or until it is overruled by a higher court.

“It has become ever more apparent that, to our president, the rule of law is but an impediment to his policy goals, the rule of law is, according to him, something to navigate around or simply ignore, whether that be for political or personal gain,” Coughenour said from the bench, to a packed courtroom. “In this courtroom and under my watch, the rule of law is a bright beacon which I intend to follow.”

Coughenour, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, read from prepared remarks, as he accused Trump of trying to change the Constitution “under the guise of an executive order.

“The Constitution is not something with which the government may pIay policy games. If the government wants to change the exceptional American grant of birthright citizenship, it needs to amend the Constitution itself,” he said. “Because the president’s order attempts to circumscribe this process, it is clearly unconstitutional.”

“We are all citizens subject to the rule of law. No amount of policy debate can change that,” Coughenour said.

A federal judge in Maryland, on Wednesday, also granted a preliminary injunction blocking Trump’s order.

U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said, in that case, that no court in the country has endorsed the Trump administration’s reading of the 14th Amendment.

“This court will not be the first,” she said, according to The Associated Press.

The two cases act as redundancies: The executive order will remain blocked unless both courts are overruled or decide otherwise.

Coughenour had, last month, blocked the executive order from going into effect, but that only lasted for 14 days.

Coughenour repeated statements that he made last month, referring to grave past injustices, wondering how jurists had allowed them to happen.

“There are moments in the world’s history when people look back and ask, ‘Where were the lawyers, where were the judges?’ ” he said Thursday. “In these moments the rule of law becomes especially vulnerable. I refuse to let that beacon go dark today.”

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown led a coalition of four states in suing the Trump administration almost immediately after it announced the executive order. Three expectant mothers — all from Central America, all now living in Washington and claiming asylum — have since joined the lawsuit, arguing that Trump would deprive their future children of the citizenship that is their right.

Several other similar lawsuits have been filed elsewhere in the country, but the one in Seattle was the first to see action.

Brown accused Trump of trying to “impose a modern version of Dred Scott,” citing the overturned 1857 Supreme Court case that denied citizenship to enslaved people and their children.

Speaking outside the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle on Thursday, Brown said the court affirmed that “we do not have a king, we have a president who must abide by the laws.”

“What we’re facing right now in this country is a Trump administration moving a hundred miles an hour in a hundred different areas and on a daily, daily basis breaking the law, violating the United States Constitution,” Brown said. “We have a lawless president who lies on a day-to-day basis.”

More than a century of legal precedent has recognized the 14th Amendment as granting U.S. citizenship to every person born here.

The amendment begins: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

“Its operation is automatic and its scope broad,” Brown wrote of the 14th Amendment in legal filings. “It provides our Nation a bright-line and nearly universal rule under which citizenship cannot be conditioned on one’s race, ethnicity, alienage, or the immigration status of one’s parents.”

Trump’s executive order would deny citizenship, going forward, to children if their parents are not citizens or permanent residents and if their mother was in the country illegally, or even if she was here legally but only temporarily.

The administration argued that people who are here illegally are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and so their children are not citizens.

To be fully “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, Trump administration lawyers wrote, a person must have a “direct and immediate allegiance to this country, unqualified by an allegiance to any other foreign power.”

“If the United States has not consented to someone’s enduring presence, it follows that it has not consented to making citizens of that person’s children,” the administration wrote in legal filings.

But Trump’s reading of the 14th Amendment, Brown argued, turns the obvious meaning of the words upside down.

Undocumented immigrants pay taxes, can be arrested, can be sued, must register for the Selective Service and must follow the same local, state and federal laws as anyone else, Brown wrote. The only people born here who are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States, Brown wrote, are the children of foreign diplomats and invading soldiers.

“Indeed, it is absurd to suggest that undocumented immigrants are somehow not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States,” Brown wrote. “They may be arrested and deported precisely because they are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.”

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