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See the full story · 26 sourcesTrump takes aim at ‘birth tourism’ just weeks after Supreme Court overturned his ban
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Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Thursday aimed at restricting the right of birthright citizenship despite the Supreme Court's recent ruling overturning his attempt to ban it.
At a White House ceremony, the president was flanked by Stephen Miller, the architect of his deportation program, as he unveiled two orders targeting birthright citizenship and “birth tourism”, which Republicans argue is a massive source of fraud.
The first will identify “certain categories of children of aliens who are not entitled to birthright citizenship”, which, according to an Axios report, will largely be used to restrict the children of foreign diplomatic staffers from being eligible for citizenship if they are born in the U.S.
Trump told reporters that he believed the orders were legal, despite the Court’s ruling. Miller used his moment in the spotlight to attack the concept of birthright citizenship and argue that it had never been the intent of the drafters of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
“As the president mentioned, the 14th Amendment was passed exclusively in the aftermath of the Civil War, so that to ensure that the children of slaves would be citizens. It had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that's been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed,” said Miller. “This is not something that is even seriously contested by anybody.”
“The president is using his authority as commander in chief to sign first an executive order using the new rule the Supreme Court issued to expand the definitions of people who are ineligible for birthright citizenship,” Miller said.
A White House staffer added during the event that there was “absolutely nothing” that would run “afoul” of the recent court ruling on the subject.
Trump used his own remarks to bash the Supreme Court justices for an “unfortunate” and “unfair” decision, which struck down an executive order aimed at preventing birthright citizenship from being extended to the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary protected status (TPS) holders.
“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we're making adjustments because it's very unfair,” Trump told reporters.
“This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves, and what's happening now? People are building businesses around it. Wealthy people are building businesses around birthright citizenship. That's not the way it's supposed to work. It's a disgrace. They're buying their way in, and we're not going to let it happen,” said the president.
“Birth tourism” allegations were central to the Trump administration’s oral arguments at the Supreme Court, where U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer claimed that billions of people are “one plane ride away from having a child who’s a U.S. citizen.”
But a 2020 analysis from the anti-immigration think tank the Center for Immigration Studies found that the number of “birth tourism” cases hovers around 20,000 to 26,000 per year, or less than 1 percent of all American births.
There are already restrictions in U.S. law banning persons from obtaining tourist visas “for the primary purpose of obtaining U.S. citizenship for a child by giving birth in the United States.”
Trump’s new orders direct the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies to crack down on that practice.
In June, the president suffered a major defeat at the hands of the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 in favor of upholding the broad protections of birthright citizenship in the face of a Trump order that would have banned some children of immigrants from receiving citizenship rights upon birth. The order targeted newborns whose mothers or fathers were undocumented or were under temporary protected status.
Trump’s latest order is still likely to come under legal challenge. The court’s order noted that many of the distinctions between classes of immigrants made by the administration in Trump’s orders simply did not exist in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
The words used throughout Trump’s order — “mother,” “father,” “lawful,” “temporary”— are absent from the 14th Amendment, Chief Justice John Roberts noted in his opinion.
“For a simple reason: they did not matter,” he added.
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