US President Donald Trump on Thursday renewed his effort to restrict birthright citizenship, signing an executive order aimed at people he said travel to the United States on tourist visas with the intention of giving birth.
“They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.
The move is the latest in Trump’s broader campaign to curb immigration, which also includes plans to deport millions of undocumented migrants and end deportation protections for nationals of more than a dozen countries.
Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisers, said the order would also seek to deny birthright citizenship to additional groups, including children of members of “foreign terrorist organizations” and people who “lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments.”
The measure “ensures that large numbers of people who wrongly (would) be getting birthright citizenship will no longer be eligible for those benefits,” Miller said.
Trump had previously signed an executive order declaring that children born in the United States to parents who are in the country illegally or on temporary visas would not automatically qualify for US citizenship.
Federal courts blocked that order, ruling that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees US citizenship to almost everyone born on American soil.
The Supreme Court upheld those rulings in a late June decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by two other conservative justices as well as the court’s three liberal justices. Trump called the ruling “very unfortunate.”
“We’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair,” he said.
The 14th Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
The provision does not apply to people outside US jurisdiction, such as children of foreign diplomats. Existing US law also allows consular officers to refuse visas if they determine an applicant’s primary purpose for travelling is to give birth in the country.
The Trump administration had argued that the 14th Amendment, adopted after the 1861-1865 Civil War, was intended to secure citizenship for formerly enslaved people rather than the children of undocumented migrants or temporary visitors.
Its legal case was based on the argument that people in the United States unlawfully or on temporary visas are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the country and therefore their children are not entitled to automatic citizenship.