We Will All Be Casualties in Trump’s War on Birthright Citizenship

On December 8, President-elect Donald Trump sat down for an interview on “Meet the Press” with Kristen Welker. The interview covered a wide range of topics, but one that drew a lot of attention was his response to a question (more of a statement) that Welker posed. She reminded him, “You promised to end birthright citizenship on day one,” to which he responded, “Correct.”

When Welker asked him about how he would “get around the 14th amendment,” Trump gave a rambling, incoherent answer about using an executive order, mixed with an easily disprovable lie that the U.S. is the only country to offer birthright citizenship, when in fact many countries do. It is important to emphasize that all U.S. presidents take an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, and when Trump says he will issue an executive order abrogating the 14th amendment, this is a clear violation of his oath and an impeachable offense.

It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America.

I previously wrote about why we need to defend birthright citizenship against right-wing attacks. That article goes into depth about the 14th amendment, the fringe and absurd conservative theory saying it doesn’t apply to children of undocumented parents, the horrible dystopia that would be created by a Trump administration that attempted to deny citizenship to people, and the positive benefits of birthright citizenship.

Here, I am going to attempt to flesh out what Donald Trump’s effort to dismantle the 14th amendment’s guarantee of citizenship for people born in the U.S. might look like and what it would mean for all of us. It is important to remember that Trump rarely speaks in terms of policy specifics. Instead, he carelessly tosses out grandiose, vague ideas and leaves it up to his underlings like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan to make actual policy out of them. Although Trump bluffs and lies frequently, he was very active on immigration in his last term, and there is no reason to think this second term will be any different.

Denial of U.S. Passports and Immigrant Petitions to Draw a Legal Challenge

I believe the most likely way that President-elect Trump would start his war on the 14th amendment would be to direct the U.S. Department of State to require that anyone applying for a U.S. passport provide proof that their parents had legal status when they were born. Inevitably, some people will not be able to meet this requirement, and their passport applications will be denied. This will draw legal challenges that will eventually make their way to the Supreme Court.

Another potential attack that Trump could make would be to direct U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to demand proof of parental status for any U.S. citizen who tries to petition for permanent resident status for their relative. If you are a U.S. citizen, you can petition for your spouse, child, or parent to obtain permanent resident status (a green card) by filing form I-130 with USCIS. Currently, the citizen petitioner only needs to show they were born in the U.S. to prove citizenship. Trump could add a requirement that they prove their parents were in lawful status when they were born. If they are unable to, then they will not be able to petition for their relatives to stay with them in the U.S.

The Supreme Court is stacked with right-wing, activist justices who have shown time and time again that they are perfectly willing to ignore the plain text of the law (in this case, the 14th amendment) if it suits their policy goals. There is a non-insignificant chance that they will ignore the text of the 14th amendment and upend over 100 years of settled law to rule by fiat that children born in the U.S. to undocumented parents are not granted citizenship at birth.

Of course, this is the goal of Miller, Homan, and the other anti-immigrant MAGA acolytes. They know that they are never going to get enough popular support for a constitutional amendment that would strip citizenship from children of undocumented parents. Their best hope is to draw a legal challenge and take their case to a MAGA-friendly Supreme Court in the hope that they will invalidate birthright citizenship through a court decision.

The Nightmare Scenario: Weaponizing ICE to Detain U.S. Citizens

The nightmare, dystopian scenario, which I touched on in my previous piece, would be for Donald Trump to direct U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to begin detaining people who were born in the U.S., but who cannot prove that their parents had lawful status when they were born. Think about how onerous of a requirement it would be to have to prove that your parents had lawful status when you were born. Most people from previous generations didn’t have any affirmative proof of citizenship, unless they naturalized. If your parents were born in the U.S., how can they prove their parents were in lawful status? What about their parents? Would you have to prove a chain of unbroken status dating back to the inception of the 14th amendment? It creates a potentially impossible standard in order to prove U.S. citizenship for anyone born in the U.S., let alone children with undocumented parents.

Let’s imagine the implications of a bad-faith Republican President like Trump aggressively challenging the citizenship of people born in the U.S. If someone is retroactively deemed to be a noncitizen, then they have likely been unlawfully present in the U.S. their entire life. Whenever they worked or voted in any U.S. election, they were doing so unlawfully. This would give ICE a way to detain virtually anyone that Donald Trump wanted to go after. Since this would apply to so many people, it could easily be used selectively against Trump’s enemies. It is worth highlighting that people in immigration detention suffer horrible conditions. People in immigration proceedings have no right to an attorney, and the government has substantial power to hold people in immigration detention without bond.

It is easy to see how a mass detention of people who should be citizens could be used in bad faith by the Trump administration to institute fascism in America. Any citizen who commits any kind of minor crime, or even requests a government benefit like food stamps, could suddenly face deportation if they can’t prove their parents had lawful status when they were born. There really is no bottom to how awful things could be if we lose the protection of birthright citizenship.

Although we cannot predict exactly how the new administration will go after the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, it is important that we stand against it at every turn, because if we lose birthright citizenship, the country we are left with won’t be one that we recognize.