Former President Donald Trump pledged Tuesday to enact an executive order ending birthright citizenship guarantees for children of illegal aliens if he regains the White House in 2024, despite past constitutional objections and failures to follow through on the move.
Trump, 76, said the agenda for his second nonconsecutive term would end both birthright citizenship and so-called “birth tourism” in the US on his first day in office — a proposal he also floated before and during his first term in the Oval Office.
“My policy will choke off a major incentive for continued illegal immigration, deter more migrants from coming, and encourage many of the aliens Joe Biden has unlawfully let into our country to go back to their home countries,” Trump said in an Agenda 47 announcement video, calling the policy a “willful misinterpretation of the law by the open borders advocates.”
“My order will also end the unfair practice known as ‘birth tourism’ where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain US citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members,” Trump added.
“It’s a practice that’s so horrible and so egregious, but we let it go forward. At least one parent will have to be a citizen or a legal resident in order to qualify.”
In 2018, the former president said he would end the practice via executive order but was rebuked by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan.
“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in, 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 on HBO” in October that year. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”
“You obviously cannot do that,” Ryan responded at the time. “You cannot end birthright citizenship with an executive order. We didn’t like it when Obama tried changing immigration laws via executive action, and obviously as conservatives, we believe in the Constitution.”
“I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case, the 14th Amendment’s pretty clear, and that would involve a very very lengthy Constitutional process,” he added.
The 14th Amendment 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.” Supreme Court rulings like the 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark have also affirmed that children of immigrants born in the US retain their citizenship.
Trump has taken fire for his record on immigration during his first term from challengers in the GOP primary, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has accused the frontrunner of “moving left” on the issue since 2016.
“He attacked me for opposing an amnesty bill in the Congress. He did support this amnesty, this 2 million illegal aliens he wanted to amnesty. I opposed it because that’s what America First principles dictate, that you are opposed to amnesty,” the 44-year-old Republican presidential hopeful said in an interview last week.
The DeSantis-aligned super PAC Never Back Down also noted Tuesday that Trump had pledged to sign such an executive order at least four times before.
“In a new ‘Agenda47’ video today, Trump announced his plan to sign an executive order on ‘Day One’ to end automatic citizenship for children of illegal aliens. ‘Day One’ would actually be Day 3,445 — the amount of time between when Trump first made this pledge in 2015 and Inauguration Day 2025,” the group said.
“If only Trump had followed through when he first talked about doing this in 2015. Or 2018. Or 2019 when he was ‘very serious.’ Or 2020. Trump had 4 years as president to write this executive order. Why didn’t he?”