Donald Trump said at multiple points during his presidency that he wished to usurp the 14th Amendment and end birthright citizenship. As the former president looks to retake office in 2024, he has now made it an official campaign promise to bar the children of undocumented immigrants from receiving citizenship at birth.
“As part of my plan to secure the border on Day 1, 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,” Trump said in a campaign video on Tuesday.
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The 14th Amendment guarantees that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump claims that this particular part of the Constitution was based on a “historical myth and a willful misinterpretation of the law by open-border advocates.”
“Even though these millions of illegal border-crossers have entered this country unlawfully, all of their future children will become automatic U.S. citizens, can you imagine?” Trump whined, arguing that the proposed policy change would deter potential future migrants and hopefully encourage a number of existing migrants to leave outright.
In 2018, Trump falsely claimed in an interview with Axios that the United States was the “only” country with birthright citizenship. A year later Trump told reporters that he was looking “very seriously” at ending the policy. Trump’s plan never came to fruition, because despite the powers Trump believes he has, the president can’t simply override the Constitution.
Virtually all of the candidates who’ve entered the race for the 2024 Republican nomination have placed immigration at the center of their platform, Trump is no exception. The former president has not only promised a hardline crackdown on border enforcement but has his own draconian policy record on immigration as president to run on.
Pushing to end birthright citizenship is far from the only way Trump has tried to crack down on immigration. During his time in office, he infamously attempted to construct a border wall, implemented the “remain-in-Mexico” policy, separated thousands of families at the border, and attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
His new platform promises to revive many if not all of those policies and expand them. In addition to rewriting citizenship laws, Rolling Stone reported that the former president has proposed bringing back his travel ban against majority Muslim countries, revising it to include additional countries.
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