WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump vowed during an extensive Sunday interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press with Kristen Welker” to sign an executive order on his first day in office to extend the constitutional right to U.S. citizenship to everyone living in the land was born to end.
But Trump also acknowledged that there would be legal hurdles to achieving his policy goal of amending the 14th Amendment. Many constitutional law scholars have argued that Trump could not stop the so-called birthright of citizenship by executive order.
“We have to end it,” Trump told Welker. “We’re going to stop this because it’s ridiculous.”
On other immigration issues, he said he was willing to reach a deal with Democrats on housing so-called Dreamers in the U.S. and that he supported deporting entire families in his mass deportation plans, even if the children themselves were U.S. citizens.
But some of his most detailed comments concerned birthright citizenship. “We have to change it,” Trump said of the 14th Amendment.
Ratified in 1868
The 14th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1868 and guarantees U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the country.
“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,” states the 14th Amendment.
Trump said he would seek to end birthright citizenship through an executive order “if we can.”
Experts object. “Today, there is no serious scholarly debate about whether a president can use executive action to contradict the Supreme Court’s long-standing and consistent interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment,” Gerald Neuman, director of the Human Rights Program at Harvard Law School, said in a statement in 2018 together with a group of constitutional law scholars.
To pass an amendment, two-thirds of the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate would need to vote Amendment of the Constitutionand three-quarters of state legislatures would have to ratify such an amendment for it to take effect. A convention could also be called by two-thirds of the state legislatures.
Republicans are expected to control both chambers by January, but not by a two-thirds margin.
During the interview, Trump also falsely claimed that the United States is the only country in the world that has citizenship by birth. More than a dozen Countries confer birthright citizenship, from Canada to Brazil.
In some countries, birthright citizenship exists, but with restrictions, such as France, where at least one parent must be a citizen for the child to receive citizenship.
A branch extended to dreamers
Welker asked Trump what his plans were for the Dreamers, the more than 500,000 people in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that he tried to end during his first term. The DACA program is currently awaiting a federal court decision decide his legal fate.
“These are people who were brought here at a very young age, and many of them are now middle-aged people, they don’t even speak the language of their country,” he said.
Trump said he would “work with Democrats on a plan” but did not go into details.
Welker asked Trump about his mass deportation plans, a campaign promise to deport millions of undocumented people, and how that would affect the more than 4 million mixed-status families, meaning families with different immigration statuses.
“I don’t want to destroy families,” Trump said. “The only way to keep the family from breaking up is to keep them together and then have to send them all back.”
Welker asked if this included children who are here legally?
“What are you going to do if they want to stay with their father?” Trump said. “We have to have rules and regulations.”
Trump did not answer repeated questions about whether he would bring back one of his toughest immigration policies. known as family separation, who separated parents from their children at the border. While most have been reunited, there are still about a quarter of children who are away from their parents.
“We don’t have to separate families,” Trump said. “We will very humanely send the whole family back to the country they came to.”
Last updated on December 9, 2024 at 4:55 p.m
