Donald Trump has renewed his pledge to end birthright citizenship for children of foreign nationals in the United States in a video he posted on his social media site, Truth Social.
“Current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump has promised to end birthright citizenship from day one of a second term in office if he wins in 2024.
Complaining that these ‘automatic citizens’ would become eligible for welfare, taxpayer-funded health care and the right to vote, and could engage in ‘chain migration’, – i.e. enter the country to later invite their family members, Trump characterized birthright citizenship as a policy that serves as ‘a reward for breaking the laws of the United States’.
‘The United States is among the only countries in the world that says that even if neither parent is a citizen or even lawfully in the country, their future children are automatic citizens the moment their parents trespass onto our soil’, he said.
Accusing ‘open border advocates’ of deliberately misinterpreting the law of the land, Trump announced that his ‘plan to secure the border’ would include measures to end birthright citizenship immediately.
‘On day one of my new term in office 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.
‘They must go back. Nobody could afford this, nobody could do this, and even morally it’s so wrong’, he said.
Trump also pledged to end the ‘unfair practice known as birth tourism’, involving people traveling to the U.S. to give birth and receive American citizenship for their children before going home.
Birthright citizenship was a pet issue for Trump during much of his presidency. He repeatedly threatened to target the law via executive order in 2018 and 2019, but did not move forward in the past, possibly due to the possibility that the Supreme Court would not support his reinterpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The 1898 Supreme Court case of United States v. Wong Kim Ark established the current interpretation of automatic birthright citizenship into law. American Samoa is the only U.S. territory where the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply, with people born there having to go through the same naturalization process as regular immigrants. Some of the territory's residents have sought to challenge this state of affairs in court, but others prefer that things stay as they are, considering themselves Samoans first and Americans second”. -Ilya Tsukanov, Sputnik News
While there is a Supreme Court decision claiming that children born to legal immigrants are granted automatic citizenship under the Constitution in the United States v. Wong Kim Ark, to claim that people subject to deportation can become the parents of a so-called United States “citizen” is a horse of a different color.