As he prepares to take office next month, President-elect Donald Trump has offered the most expansive look at his incoming administration's plans to tamp down illegal immigration into the U.S., taking aim at birthright citizenship in his first post-election interview.
In a "Meet the Press" interview that aired Sunday, Trump reiterated his long-term aim of ending birthright citizenship, a constitutional guarantee that any person born on U.S. soil has citizenship status. He told moderator Kristen Welker he intends to repeal the protection on day one of his presidency through executive action, stripping rights from Americans born to two undocumented parents.
"Do you know if somebody sets a foot, just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two, on our land — 'Congratulations you are now a citizen of the United States of America,'” he said. "Yes, we’re going to end that because it’s ridiculous."
But immigration law and policy experts told Salon that Trump has no real legal pathway toward repealing birthright citizenship, despite his claims. Instead, they said, his insistence on pursuing the plan — alongside his call for mass deportations — will create fear among communities of immigrants and their children that will act as a deterrent.
"President-elect Trump is trying to send a message to people all over the world and also to unauthorized immigrants in the United States that he's going to be tough on immigration," argued Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a nonpartisan think tank.
"He hopes that people will choose not to make the trip to the United States and not try to enter," she told Salon in a phone interview. "I think he also hopes that people who are living in the United States without status might opt to leave the country on their own."
Trump has signaled an interest in repealing birthright citizenship since his first run for president, including the change in his immigration policy proposal in 2015, according to CNN. Trump insisted to Axios in 2018 that it was possible to do so through an executive order and last May, Trump released a campaign video proclaiming he would sign an executive order to roll back the right on day one of his presidency, according to NBC News.
The impact of repealing the right would be immense. A 2020 MPI and Pennsylvania State University analysis found that ending birthright citizenship for U.S. babies with two undocumented immigrant parents would lead to a 4.7 million-person increase in the population of unauthorized people by 2050, including one million children born to two parents who had been born in the U.S. themselves.
That population would skyrocket to 24 million by 2050 from 11 million at the time of the analysis' publishing if U.S. babies with only one undocumented parent were also denied citizenship, the researchers found.
Gelatt said that such an action from the Trump administration would create a "multigenerational class of people who are excluded from full rights" and citizenship, which would restrain their ability to achieve higher earnings, support their families and contribute to the country through taxes.
"Denying people that legal status, even if they're born in the United States, would put people in a much more legally vulnerable, economically vulnerable position," she said.
Depending on the exact language of Trump's proposed executive order, ending birthright citizenship could also impact U.S.-born children's parents, added Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor of immigration law practice at Cornell Law School. Such an order could potentially prevent officials from issuing passports, Social Security numbers or providing welfare benefits to family members of those children.
But Trump has no viable legal pathway to repealing birthright citizenship, Yale-Loehr told Salon in an email. An executive order can't repeal an amendment, and any executive action Trump took attempting to do so would "trigger immediate litigation."
Birthright citizenship was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution in 1868 with the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which was intended to grant citizenship and civil liberties to formerly enslaved African Americans. Contrary to what Trump told Welker, more than 30 nations, largely in the western hemisphere, provide birthright citizenship.
Amending the Constitution to upend the 14th Amendment would require a two-thirds vote in both the House and the Senate as well as ratification by three-fourths of the state legislatures. Even with slim Republican majorities in both chambers during Trump's next term, such a proposal would be unlikely to get past either chamber.
His proposed executive order is also unlikely to withstand any legal challenges as the likelihood of the Supreme Court, despite its conservative majority, striking birthright citizenship from the Constitution is slim to none, added Hiroshi Motomura, a UCLA School of Law professor and faculty co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and policy.
"Even though people say that the court has become more conservative, this would be even further in the direction of trying to overturn the past than we've seen," he told Salon in a phone interview.
Ending birthright citizenship would upend the foundation of how the nation has historically seen itself — as a country of immigrants — flying in the face of the purpose of the American Civil War and much of the United States immigration history since its founding, Motomura said. He pointed to the 1898 U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court decision that held that U.S.-born children of Chinese immigrants were U.S. citizens under the 14th Amendment even though their parents were, at the time, legally barred from obtaining citizenship under the Chinese Exclusion Acts.
"This is all part of the racial history of the United States. This is why this is so bedrock compared to other things that the Supreme Court is sometimes characterized for doing as being quite radical," he explained. "This goes way beyond overruling Roe v. Wade. I think that was a radical move, but this is no comparison. This is quite a bit more of a rethinking of what the country is even about."
Given how unlikely it is that Trump would succeed at repealing birthright citizenship, what purpose, then, could Trump's focus on ending the right serve? Generating political value, Gelatt and Motomura argued, the former pointing to the importance of illegal immigration and the border to voters during the 2024 election.
"Making the announcement makes people afraid and anxious, and I think it says to his supporters, 'you count, and these other people don't,'" Motomura said. "This was in the air during his first term, and so I think even if he does nothing or keeps threatening, there's a great deal of value sending a message to his base that he's doing something about the immigration question."
In taking aim at birthright citizenship, Motomura added, Trump is opting for the "simple-minded solution," which would lead to the exclusion from citizenship and relegation to a "third class" status of Americans who have been protected for nearly 160 years.
"It's similar to saying that you can stop undocumented or unlawful irregular migration by building a wall," he said, adding: "Ultimately, I think it's corrosive to the whole country."
