Lifestyle

Trump Wants To End Birthright Citizenship With An Executive Order

by Valerie Williams
Updated: 
Originally Published: 
Image via NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images

Trump is targeting birthright citizenship with his plans for a new executive order

It seems that every day with the Trump administration is a fresh hell and today’s new reason to panic over the demise of our democracy is President Trump saying he plans to end birthright citizenship by attempting to bypass the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to kids of non-citizens who are born in the U.S..

As it has for over 150 years.

In what could possibly be a ploy to get the media (and his vile base) going before mid-terms, Trump announced in an interview with Axios that will air this Sunday his plans to eliminate the automatic right to citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to non-citizens. He tells Axios he’s run the idea by White House counsel and plans to move forward with the order, which will undoubtedly be met with legal challenges.

“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” says the idiot who’s obviously not taken any U.S. history classes recently. As horrifying as his executive order idea sounds, it will have to go through a sizable court battle before becoming the law of the land. Legal scholars are already weighing in and it doesn’t sound as though Trump has the power he thinks he has.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies, says, “This will set up the court fight — the order will be enjoined, case will eventually reach SCOTUS, which then will finally have to rule on the meaning of ‘subject to the jurisdiction’.”

When told that his evil plan might not work out the way he assumes, Trump says, “You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.” This actually flies in the face of the 14th Amendment which 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.”

He then continues to prove he knows precious little of this country and its laws (or other countries and their laws), which is just fantastic coming from the actual leader of the free world. “We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States … with all of those benefits,” Trump continued. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

In reality, more than 30 countries, nearly all in the Western Hemisphere, guarantee birthright citizenship. But since when have facts and laws and history meant a single thing to this proudly ignorant man and his followers?

If Trump signs this executive order, it will directly challenge the 14th Amendment and the Supreme Court will be forced to weigh in. Hopefully, it won’t come to fruition and he’s just blathering as usual, but a real thing happening right now is the deployment of 5,200 troops to the border to block the caravan of migrants expected to arrive in the coming weeks.

His latest racist idea is just another in a long string of racist ideas, all that prove his ultimate platform is hate, plain and simple. We should all be horrified — and afraid.

This article was originally published on