Can Trump revoke birthright citizenship?

President Donald Trump has announced plans to end “birthright citizenship,” which refers to U.S. citizenship granted automatically to anyone born in the United States.

Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

He said he wanted to end it with an executive order in recent media interviews as well as during his previous mandate as president.

The plan was mentioned again Monday at a news conference by new White House administration officials.

The official provided no details on how the administration hopes to accomplish this.

Although he has pledged to end the practice, any attempt to do so would face significant legal hurdles, and any executive order attempting to do so would likely be immediately overturned by a court.

The bar for amending the Constitution is extremely high, requiring approval by two-thirds of Congress in both the House and Senate. It must also be ratified by three-quarters of the states.

The first sentence of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution establishes the principle of “citizenship by law”:

“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 in which they reside.”

Immigration hardliners argue that the policy is a “big magnet for illegal immigration” and that it encourages undocumented pregnant women to cross the border to give birth, an act that has been pejoratively called “birth tourism” or having an “anchor baby.”

The 14th Amendment was adopted in 1868, after the end of the Civil War. The 13th Amendment had abolished slavery in 1865, while the 14th settled the question of citizenship for former freed slaves born in the United States.

Previous Supreme Court decisions, such as Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, had ruled that African Americans could never be U.S. citizens. The 14th Amendment overturned that.

In 1898, the United States Supreme Court affirmed that birthright law applied to the children of immigrants in Wong Kim Ark v. United States. Wong was a 24-year-old child of Chinese immigrants who was born in the United States but was denied entry upon returning from a visit to China. Wong successfully argued that because he was born in the United States, his parents’ immigration status did not impact the application of the 14th Amendment.

“Wong Kim Ark v. United States asserted that, regardless of the race or immigration status of one’s parents, all people born in the United States were entitled to all the rights that citizenship affords,” Erika writes Lee, director of the Center for Research on the History of Immigration. at the University of Minnesota. “The court has not revisited this issue since.”

Most legal experts agree that President Trump cannot end birthright citizenship by executive order.

“He’s doing something that’s going to upset a lot of people, but ultimately it’s going to be the courts’ decision,” said Saikrishna Prakash, a constitutional expert and professor at the University of Virginia Law School. “It’s not something he can decide alone.”

Mr. Prakash said that even if the president can order employees of federal agencies to interpret citizenship more narrowly — U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, for example — doing so will inevitably lead to legal challenges to the share of people whose citizenship is refused.

This could lead to a lengthy legal battle that could ultimately end up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

A constitutional amendment could remove the right to citizenship, but that would require a two-thirds vote in the House of Representatives and the Senate and the approval of three-quarters of U.S. states.

According to Research on the benchAbout 250,000 babies were born to unauthorized immigrant parents in the United States in 2016, representing a 36% decrease from the 2007 peak. In 2022, the latest year for which data is available, 1.2 million U.S. citizens in total were born to unauthorized parents. immigrant parents, Pew found.

But because those children also have children, the cumulative effect of ending the birthright would increase the number of illegal immigrants in the country to 4.7 million in 2050, the Migration Policy Institute think tank found.

In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, Trump said he believes children of illegal immigrants should be deported alongside their parents, even if they were born in the United States.

“I don’t want to break up families,” Trump said last December. “So the only way to not break up the family is to keep them together and send them all away.”

More than 30 countries – including Canada, Mexico, Malaysia and Lesotho – automatically practice “jus soli” or “right of the soil” without restriction.

Other countries, such as the United Kingdom and Australia, allow a modified version in which citizenship is automatically granted if one parent is a citizen or permanent resident.