Former President Trump is returning to his calls to remove birthright citizenship, with his 2024 White House campaign announcing Tuesday he would seek to end it via executive order on his first day in office.
Trump announced his plan on the 125th anniversary of United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the Supreme Court case that established the constitutional right to birthright citizenship.
The proposal echoes a longtime demand of immigration restrictionists and a measure Trump toyed with while in office, attracting criticism from both immigration advocates and legal experts.
The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to those “born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”
The widely accepted interpretation of that amendment — that it applies to children born in the United States regardless of the parents’ immigration status — has held since an 1898 Supreme Court case involving a U.S. citizen with Chinese parents.
The 14th amendment was adopted after the Civil War to guarantee equal rights for former slaves but immigration restrictionists argue that excludes the children of other groups like undocumented immigrants from its benefits.
According to the Trump campaign, the executive order “will explain the clear meaning of the 14th Amendment,” which it says is that the children of foreign nationals born in the United States are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States as defined in the Constitution.