FACT FOCUS: A look at the Trump administration's challenge to birthright citizenship
The battle over birthright citizenship hasn’t ended for President Donald Trump despite a June 30 Supreme Court ruling that rejected his executive order declaring that children born to parents who are in the United States illegally or temporarily are not American citizens.
“I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY,” he said this week on his social media platform Truth Social, saying so-called birth tourism networks, which arrange for non-U.S. citizens to come to the country solely to give birth, have become an immense industry.
“This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision,” he wrote.
The Trump administration has never been subtle about its views on the practice, which has long granted automatic citizenship to nearly everyone born on U.S. soil. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that would have heavily restricted birthright citizenship, upending more than a century of constitutional and legal history.
“You know, we’re the only country that has it,” Trump said in one interview, a claim he has made repeatedly. And falsely.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
Birthright citizenship became law in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, in part to ensure that former slaves would be citizens.
In the late 1800s, in the case of Wong Kim Ark, a man born in the U.S. to Chinese parents, it was expanded to include children of immigrants. In later cases, the Supreme Court ruled that anyone born in the U.S. is a citizen, including if their parents are in the U.S. illegally or temporarily.
There are a tiny number of exceptions, mostly for children born in the U.S. to foreign diplomats.
It became an accepted part of U.S. jurisprudence and, until Trump, few saw it as controversial.
That's not surprising, since until fairly recently even many Republicans spoke warmly about immigration.
Recent immigrants “have crawled over walls and under barbed wire and through mine fields” to reach the U.S., President Ronald Reagan said at a 1984 naturalization ceremony in Detroit for new citizens.
“And all of them have added to the sum total of what your new country is.”
Opposition to immigration has long been central to Trump’s campaigns, and he has tapped into public frustration with issues like soaring illegal border crossings during the Biden administration, when border arrests from Mexico reached a record-high of 250,000 in just one month.
To Trump, birthright citizenship is a “magnet for illegal immigration,” with administration officials often pointing to illegal “birth tourism” networks that arrange for non-U.S. citizens to come to the country solely to give birth, acquiring U.S. citizenship for their children.
Birth tourism is a lucrative business in both the U.S. and abroad, though it is far less common than Trump claims. Companies take out advertisements and charge tens of thousands of dollars to facilitate the practice.
The U.S. has been cracking down on the practice since before Trump took office the first time. Giving birth on U.S. soil by temporary visa holders is not illegal, applying for a visa solely to get U.S. citizenship for a child is an act of fraud, according to the Migration Policy Institute.
In legal arguments against the practice, government lawyers often focus on one phrase in the amendment: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Breaking with most legal scholars, they insist that means the U.S. can deny citizenship to babies born to women who are in the country illegally.
But during April’s oral arguments on the case, even some conservative Supreme Court justices questioned that approach.
No.
It’s true that the practice isn’t the norm around the world. In most countries, a child’s citizenship follows that of its parents, no matter where the birth takes place.
Yet dozens of countries other than the United States have unrestricted birthright citizenship. Most are in the Americas, including Canada, Mexico and many nations in Central and South America.
Dozens of other countries, from Germany to Australia, have a mixed approach, using a variety of principles, including parenthood, place of birth, residency and ethnicity, to decide a child’s citizenship.
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