The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Trump targets birthright citizenship
He vows order to nullify guarantee; Ryan rejects idea.
President Donald Trump said he was preparing an executive order that would nullify the long-accepted constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship in the United States, his latest attention-grabbing maneu- ver days before midterm congressional elections as he has sought to activate his base by vowing to clamp down on immigrants and immigration.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Trump told Axios during an interview that was released in part on Tuesday, making a false claim. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
In fact, at least 30 other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports restricting immigration.
But Trump’s plan met with swift pushback from some even in his own party Tuesday. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., who is retir- ing, said in an interview that the president “obviously” cannot eviscerate birthright citizenship by executive order.
“You obviously cannot do that,” Ryan told WVLK, a radio station in Lexington, Kentucky. “I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution.”
Ryan compared the idea of doing so to Barack Obama’s 2012 action to grant work permits and depor- tation reprieves to some immigrants brought ille- gally to the United States as children, which Repub- licans, including Trump, protested as an abuse of presidential power.
Doing away with birth- right citizenship for the children of immigrants in the country illegally was an idea Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempt- ing to would be certain to prompt legal challenges.
To accomplish the idea he floated Tuesday, Trump would have to find a way around the 14th Amend- ment to the Constitution, which states, “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.”
The amendment means that any child born in the United States is considered a citizen.
Amendments to the Constitution cannot be overrid- den by presidential action — they can be changed or undone only by overwhelming majorities in Congress or the states, with a twothirds vote of both houses of Congress or through a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of state legislatures.
Some conservatives have long made the argument that the 14th Amendment was meant to apply only to citizens and legal perma- nent residents, not immi- grants who are present in the country without autho- rization.
“We all cherish the lan- guage of the 14th Amend- ment, but the Supreme Court of the United States has never ruled on whether the language of the 14th Amendment — ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof ’ — applies specifically to people who are in the country illegally,” Vice President Mike Pence told Politico in an interview Tuesday, several hours after Trump’s comments were reported.
In an opinion piece in The Washington Post this year, Michael Anton, a former spokesman for Trump’s National Security Council, said birthright citizenship was based on a misreading of the amendment, and of an 1898 Supreme Court ruling that he argued pertained only to the children of legal residents.
The proposal provoked outrage among civil rights groups, a response that Trump’s advisers have argued privately is a central objective of many of the president’s most aggressive proposals on immigration and other matters.
Jess Morales Rocketto, the chairwoman of Families Belong Together, an immigrant advocacy group, called the idea “ethnic cleansing.”