[President-elect Donald Trump’s team is assessing multiple options to end birthright citizenship, a move that would likely spark a legal fight and challenge the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.
Trump has long railed against birthright citizenship, suggesting he would use executive action to ban it, but his team is considering a more strategic approach. They are discussing options to tighten the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, including directing the State Department not to issue passports to children of undocumented parents and tightening requirements for tourist visas to curb “birth tourism.”
The plan is to present the new policy as a way to crack down on what they see as an abuse of the system, but legal experts are skeptical, saying it would likely be met with legal challenges and the Supreme Court would ultimately decide the matter.
“If we can, through executive action. I was going to do it through executive action, but then we had to fix Covid first, to be honest with you,” Trump said in a recent interview.
The 14th Amendment has been interpreted to mean that all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States. The Supreme Court has upheld this interpretation in several precedents, including a 1898 case that ruled that the amendment applied to children born on US soil whose parents are noncitizens.
But Trump allies argue that the 14th Amendment has been misinterpreted and doesn’t apply to children born in the US to undocumented parents. They point to the fact that about three dozen countries provide automatic citizenship to people born on their soil, including the majority of South American countries.
As the Trump team prepares to present the new policy, legal experts are already planning to challenge it in court. “We expect to sue, and others will as well,” said the deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project.
Supporting the case for affirming birthright citizenship is the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, as well as longstanding Supreme Court precedents and statutes that predate the constitutional provision. Democratic attorneys general are also eager to get into the fight, with one pointing out that the proposal could affect his own wife, a daughter of Chinese immigrants who was born in Philadelphia.
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