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President Trump signed two executive orders Thursday aimed at narrowing birthright citizenship, weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his broader attempt to end it.
Some shit you should know before you dig in: Shortly after President Trump returned to office, he signed an executive order that tried to redefine who the 14th Amendment actually covers. Since 1868, the amendment has guaranteed citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil. The White House position was that parents on a temporary visa, or with no paperwork at all, sat outside US jurisdiction, so their kids never had a claim to citizenship in the first place. The administration also claimed the amendment was written solely to cover the children of freed slaves and had been misread ever since. The Supreme Court rejected all of it on June 30 in a 6-3 ruling, with five justices finding the guarantee is written into the Constitution itself, meaning it would take a constitutional amendment to change. Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative, wrote there was “scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view” of the amendment’s purpose. “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community,” he added. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
What’s going on now: Trump signed two orders that work around the edges of exceptions the court already recognizes, rather than challenging the ruling head-on. Two carve-outs have long been settled law: babies born to diplomats, and babies born to enemy forces occupying US ground. The first order stretches both.
It expands the diplomat carve-out to cover other foreign government employees and people whose job is pushing another government’s interests here, and it widens “alien enemies” to include members of designated terrorist organizations. The same order denies citizenship to children whose parents committed fraud to obtain their own, and to anyone born in a US territory where Congress has never written citizenship into law, which right now means only American Samoa.
The second order directs the State Department and DHS to crack down on birth tourism and the outfits that set it up. That is already illegal. Federal law bans obtaining a visa “for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States,” and immigration officers can turn away pregnant travelers on those grounds.
“They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” Trump said in the Oval Office, calling the ruling “very, very unfortunate.” He claimed “hundreds of thousands” of people use birth tourism and said one man showed up claiming 56 children and another claiming 98.
Hours after the signing, the ACLU vowed to challenge the orders. Cody Wofsy of the ACLU said, “The Supreme Court already decided this issue. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution. Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one.”
