{"id":805345,"date":"2026-08-07T04:32:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-07T04:32:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805345\/"},"modified":"2026-08-07T04:32:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-07T04:32:16","slug":"trumps-birthright-citizenship-attack-the-latest-effort-in-obsessive-campaign-us-immigration","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/805345\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s birthright citizenship attack the latest effort in obsessive campaign | US immigration"},"content":{"rendered":"

With a pair of executive orders on Thursday, Donald Trump<\/a> has tried \u2013 once again \u2013 to undermine the guarantee of birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the US constitution and reaffirmed by the supreme court just five weeks ago.<\/p>\n

The orders attempt to broaden the categories of children who would be ineligible for automatic US citizenship and ban so-called \u201cbirth tourism\u201d, which the president claimed is practiced by \u201chundreds of thousands\u201d of people.<\/p>\n

That estimate appears to be wildly inflated. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate<\/a> \u201cputs birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024\u201d.<\/p>\n

It was the latest attack in a quixotic campaign that the US president has waged for more than a decade.<\/p>\n

At a Republican presidential primary campaign event in Orlando, Florida in November 2015, Trump hinted<\/a> that he had a plan to end what he called the scourge of \u201canchor babies\u201d, a derogatory term for the US-citizen children of undocumented immigrants.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t come into the country \u2013 you\u2019re illegal, you come down, you sit down, you have your baby, and we take care of the baby for the next 85 years!\u201d Trump said. \u201cEverybody says, \u2018Well, you need a constitutional amendment, it\u2019ll take 15 years, it\u2019ll never happen\u2019. You don\u2019t, you don\u2019t. You need a simple act of Congress. You might not even need that.\u201d<\/p>\n

If elected, Trump promised the crowd at a resort near Disney World, \u201cthe anchor baby, birthright citizenship, it\u2019s over.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three years later, as president, Trump said in a televised interview<\/a> just before the 2018 midterms that he planned to issue an executive order to instruct federal agencies that children born in the United States to non-citizens were not entitled to US citizenship at birth.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don\u2019t,\u201d Trump told the interviewer Jonathan Swan. \u201cYou can definitely do it with an act of Congress,\u201d Trump added, incorrectly, \u201cbut now they\u2019re saying I can do it just with an executive order.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Swan reported<\/a> at the time, Trump\u2019s claim that he could undo the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th amendment to the constitution<\/a> was a minority view among legal scholars, but was supported by a then-obscure figure: John Eastman<\/a>, a former law clerk to supreme court justice Clarence Thomas who had argued for decades that the amendment granting citizenship to \u201cAll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,\u201d should be read to exclude the children of people who are not US citizens when their child is born.<\/p>\n

Eastman later claimed in a 2020 Newsweek op-ed<\/a> that Kamala Harris was ineligible for the vice-presidency because she had no right to US citizenship at birth, since she was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to non-citizen parents who were, \u201csubject to the jurisdiction\u201d of their native lands of India and Jamaica.<\/p>\n

In the 2018 interview, Trump called birthright citizenship \u201cridiculous\u201d, and falsely asserted that the US is \u201cthe only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.\u201d In fact, 32 other nations<\/a> grant citizenship this way. He also claimed then that an executive order was in the process of being drafted.<\/p>\n

Although that order did not materialize until the start of Trump\u2019s second term, and was struck down in June by the supreme court, his obsession with casting doubt on the citizenship of children born in the US to foreign parents has had an overtly political element from the start.<\/p>\n

After all, Trump\u2019s original rise to political prominence was tied to his false claim that Barack Obama, born to an American mother and a Kenyan father in Honolulu, just two years after Hawaii became a state, might have been born outside the US.<\/p>\n

Then, after Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020, Trump repeatedly refused to confirm<\/a> that she was eligible for an elected office open only to \u201ca natural-born citizen.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead, Trump called the question Eastman raised about Harris\u2019s citizenship at birth in his Newsweek op-ed \u201cvery serious\u201d and a potential \u201cproblem\u201d for her. He also praised Eastman<\/a> as \u201ca very highly qualified, very talented lawyer\u201d and called him \u201cbrilliant\u201d.<\/p>\n

Eastman, who went on to devise the fake electors scheme designed to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election, and gave an inflammatory speech before the Capitol riot on January 6 2021, was finally disbarred by the California supreme court in April, based on<\/a> \u201cclear and convincing evidence that he advanced false claims about the 2020 presidential election to mislead courts, public officials, and the American public.\u201d<\/p>\n

While asserting the right to deny citizenship to some children of non-citizens is clearly still a priority for Trump, it remains to be seen if his latest attempts to curtail the right will succeed. The two new orders are likely to face legal challenges, and come just weeks after the US supreme court struck down<\/a> Trump\u2019s previous order denying citizenship to the children of non-citizens, issued on the first day of his second term.<\/p>\n

In the court\u2019s June decision, chief justice John Roberts said Trump\u2019s first order violated the 14th amendment of the US constitution.<\/p>\n

\u201cCitizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights \u2013 to freely participate in our political community,\u201d he wrote. \u201cThe framers of the 14th amendment extended that promise to \u2018every free-born person in this land\u2019. We keep that promise today.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a pair of executive orders on Thursday, Donald Trump has tried \u2013 once again \u2013 to undermine…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":805346,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-805345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805345"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805345\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/805346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}