Trump’s Birthright Citizenship Threat Shows His True Target

The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants was one of Donald Trump’s principal campaign promises in 2024. There has been a lot of debate about whether he will actually attempt to expel all of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently in the country or whether he’ll focus on those convicted of serious crimes other than entering the U.S. illegally (an estimated 8,400 people). But as Inauguration Day rapidly approaches, a whole new question has arisen: Will the 47th president also go after major restrictions in legal avenues for immigration, including the bedrock principle of “birthright citizenship”?

Reducing all forms of immigration has been an abiding goal of Stephen Miller, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser and future White House deputy chief of staff for policy. And as The Wall Street Journal noted recently, the first Trump administration made numerous attempts to reduce legal immigration (though many were thwarted in the courts):

In 2017, [Trump] held an event at the White House to honor the introduction of a bill known as the Raise Act, which would have cut legal immigration levels roughly in half and ended the system allowing U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents and siblings for green cards, which conservatives refer to as “chain migration.” The bill failed to advance through Congress. …

Overall, an analysis by the National Foundation for American Policy, a pro-immigration think tank, found that Trump’s administration adopted 52 policies to restrict access to visas and green cards for highly skilled workers, and didn’t put in place any policies to ease their access.

So it was always safe to assume that a second Trump administration would attempt to reduce various forms of legal immigration. But now Trump himself has pledged to do something far more sweeping on his first day in office: issue an executive order eliminating birthright citizenship. In an interview with Meet the Press last weekend, Trump called birthright citizenship “ridiculous,” adding, “We have to end it.”

This would presumably expose millions to deportation from the land where they were born. As Christian Farias noted in New York Magazine when Trump threatened to end birthright citizenship in 2018, this issue would certainly wind up in the courts, as it exceeds Trump’s authority as president and violates a constitutional right:

The framers of the slavery-ending, post-Civil War amendments may have made grand pronouncements about “due process” and “equal protection of the laws” in the text of the 14th Amendment, which courts have interpreted expansively. But they left no ambiguities when they wrote the amendment’s citizenship clause: “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.”

Since a landmark Supreme Court decision in 1898 struck down openly racist anti-Asian immigration policies, it’s been clearly understood this clause applies to the children of non-citizens born in the United States under any circumstance. Nativist politicians have periodically bridled at this idea as an invitation to illegal immigration by those who want their children to gain citizenship, but the courts haven’t agreed. An executive order ending birthright citizenship would test whether the recently Trumpified federal judiciary — and particularly a conservative Supreme Court majority that has been so accommodating to Trump’s needs — might reconsider precedents and open the door to the most fundamental change in the very idea of what constitutes an American since the 19th century.

Even if that doesn’t happen, raising the question of birthright citizenship right off the bat could benefit Trump strategically in two ways. First, challenging this right might make it more politically palatable to separate the estimated 4.3 million U.S. citizens whose parents are undocumented from their soon-to-be-deported family members. Even though the Trump administration can’t deport these citizens, it could accuse them of causing their own “family separation” if they choose not to “self-deport.” Second, Trump and Miller may simply want to begin their nativist crusade with the most expansive and audacious proposals in their arsenal. Perhaps they believe that once eliminating birthright citizenship is on the table, their more legally defensible plans will seem less draconian.