Trump seeks to end birthright citizenship

> Some legal experts say president is running afoul of constitution

WASHINGTON: With congressional elections a week away, President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he will seek to scrap the right of citizenship for US-born children of non-citizens and illegal immigrants as he tries again to dramatically reshape immigration policies.

Reviving his support for a legally questionable theory, Trump told the Axios news website he would issue an executive order on so-called birthright citizenship, an issue that has long rankled some conservative Republicans.

Trump’s previous calls to end the practice have resonated with his political base, but moderate Republicans and some legal experts say Trump is running afoul of the US Constitution.

Under the Constitution’s 14th Amendment, enacted in the wake of the Civil War to ensure that black Americans previously subject to slavery had full citizenship rights, citizenship is granted to “all persons born or naturalised in the US”.

It has been routinely interpreted over the years to confer citizenship to people born in the US whose parents are illegal immigrants.

Trump, who has made rhetoric against illegal immigrants a central plank of his presidency, originally spoke out against birthright citizenship when he first started running for president in 2015.

Frequent Trump ally and Republican senator Lindsey Graham said he would move to introduce legislation “along the same lines” as Trump’s order. Other Republicans were critical. US House of Representatives speaker Paul Ryan said Trump could not scrap the right with the stroke of a pen.

“You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order,” Ryan, the top Republican in Congress, said.

In the run-up to the Nov 6 congressional elections, Trump has seized on a caravan of migrants from Central America who are trekking through Mexico toward the US, calling the migrants a threat.

On Monday, the US said it would send over 5,200 troops to help secure the border with Mexico.

Bill Kristol, editor at large of the conservative Weekly Standard and a Trump critic, tweeted: “The shrinking caravan of refugees isn’t a threat to the country or the constitutional order.

“A president who tries to end birthright citizenship by executive order is.”

Ilya Shapiro, a lawyer with the libertarian Cato Institute, said that although there is a debate in academic circles among conservatives on whether Congress could legislate on the issue without running afoul of the 14th Amendment, “it’s not something that can be done by executive action alone”.

Saikrishna Prakash, a conservative legal scholar at the University of Virginia, said Trump faces long legal odds to ending citizenship as a birthright.

“We’re a nation of immigrants so if I were to bet I would think the president is going to lose,” he said. – Reuters