US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a fresh executive order aimed at restricting birthright citizenship, targeting people he claimed enter 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 journalists in the Oval Office.
The move follows a late June ruling by the US Supreme Court, which struck down his previous attempt to limit the constitutionally protected right. Trump described the court’s decision as “very unfortunate”, reports AFP.
“We’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair,” he said.
Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers, said the latest order would also deny birthright citizenship to other groups, including children of members of “foreign terrorist organizations” and “large categories of 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.
Last year, Trump signed another executive order stating that children born in the United States to parents living in the country illegally or holding temporary visas would not automatically qualify for US citizenship.
However, lower courts blocked that order, ruling that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution grants American citizenship to almost everyone born on US soil.
The Supreme Court upheld that interpretation in a majority opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by two other conservative-leaning justices as well as the court’s three liberal-leaning justices.
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 amendment does not apply to individuals who are not subject to US jurisdiction, such as the children of foreign diplomats. Under existing US law, consular officers may already refuse visas if they believe an applicant is travelling to the United States primarily to give birth.
The Trump administration argued unsuccessfully that the 14th Amendment, adopted after the 1861–1865 Civil War, was intended to guarantee citizenship rights for formerly enslaved people rather than the children of undocumented migrants or foreign visitors.
Trump’s previous executive order was based on the argument that people living in the United States illegally or staying on visas are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the country and therefore should not qualify for automatic citizenship.
The renewed effort to restrict birthright citizenship forms part of Trump’s broader anti-immigration agenda, which includes plans to deport millions of undocumented migrants and end deportation protections for nationals from more than a dozen countries.
