In President-elect Donald Trump’s recent interview with NBC News’ Kristen Welker, host of “Meet the Press,” he once again promised to end birthright citizenship when he takes office in January. “You know we’re the only country that has it,” Trump falsely claimed. While he flubbed many of the details about birthright citizenship, our focus should be on how radical a change it would truly be to no longer guarantee citizenship and its privileges to every child born in the United States. It’s a gutting of America’s promise that could only emerge from a purposeful, malicious and inherently cruel misreading of the Constitution.
It’s a gutting of America’s promise that could only emerge from a purposeful, malicious and inherently cruel misreading of the Constitution.
As the Trump campaign laid out over the summer, the proposed executive order he would sign would limit the scope of automatic citizenship to children born here and require at least one parent to prove they are either a U.S. citizen or a permanent resident. In the absence of such evidence, federal agencies would be ordered to deny the newborn from receiving a Social Security number and block the parents from receiving any federal benefits like the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, better known as WIC. That baby would also be denied a U.S. passport and any other documentary proof of citizenship.
Trump first pushed a similar change back in 2018, but it got put far on the backburner by more cautious staffers. This time around, though, his incoming deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, and other hard-liners are preparing to move forward with as many restrictions on immigration as possible. They subscribe to a worldview that has long rejected the notion that America’s white Christian heritage can stand while also freely accepting the children of nonwhite migrants or formerly enslaved Black people as equal citizens under the Constitution.
Miller’s fringe reading of the 14th Amendment becoming federal policy requires ignoring the amendment’s exceedingly plain language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump hopes to add an asterisk to the clause and exclude potentially hundreds of thousands of babies each year. It would, in effect, transform those newborn U.S. citizens into undocumented aliens before they’ve completed their first day on Earth.
Trump’s campaign argued that the change is needed to deter illegal border crossings and prevent what’s derisively called “anchor babies” from acting as a backdoor for undocumented parents to remain. But the requirement would also exclude babies born to parents who are in the U.S. legally but aren’t permanent residents. Not only would that exclude babies born to those on temporary work or student visas, but it would also exclude babies born to those who’ve been admitted as refugees or granted political asylum.
America would be transformed from one of the most free and welcoming countries into a “blood and soil” nation of exclusion
In the latter case, asylees and refugees must wait a year before even applying to become a permanent resident. Even applying for and acquiring an employer-sponsored green card can take up to three years. And as best we can tell from what Trump’s team has said, babies born in the meantime wouldn’t be counted as citizens, no matter where in the application process their parents might be. Instead, there would now be a second-class tier of children who could be expelled with their parents as part of Trump’s promised mass deportations.
Tellingly, the way that the policy has been described suggests that Trump’s team has learned from the chaos of the 2017 “Muslim ban.” Rather than going for the most sweeping change possible, Miller and his cohorts have suggested a common-sense measure that would save taxpayers money, only affect children born to two undocumented parents and not be retroactive.
Even so, such a change will provoke a mountain of litigation almost immediately, and rightly so. It will be a hard sell even for the archconservative majority on the Supreme Court to overturn more than a century of precedent affirming that citizenship is granted at birth. But that won’t stop the right-wing ghouls from pushing for that to be overturned.
There’s a danger in even being willing to accept any exceptions in the notion that people born in the United States are citizens. It’s just a small step from there to requiring citizenship from one parent as a prerequisite; then both parents; then grandparents. America would be transformed from one of the most free and welcoming countries into a “blood and soil” nation of exclusion, one built on the backs of children whose only crime was being born under Trump’s second regime.
Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He focuses on politics and policymaking at the federal level, including Congress and the White House.