Trump Administration Releases New Plans to Enforce Birthright Citizenship Order

2025/08/02 Leave a comment

Good overview:

Current Birthright Citizenship Rules vs. Proposed Changes

While the executive order is not yet in effect, recent documents from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the State Department, and the Social Security Administration (SSA) outline the administration’s intended approach. The proposed strategy involves implementing stricter requirements for parents to obtain U.S. passports, Social Security numbers (SSNs), and federal benefits for their U.S.-born children.

How It Currently Works

  • A child’s U.S. birth certificate is considered sufficient proof of U.S. citizenship, and parents can present it to the government to get a passport, SSN, and federal benefits for their child.
  • Parents don’t need to prove their own citizenship or immigration status when applying for these documents or benefits on their U.S.-born child’s behalf (except in cases involving foreign diplomats, who aren’t considered under U.S. jurisdiction).

How It Would Work Under the Proposed Plan

  • For any child born in the U.S. after the executive order’s effective date, their U.S. birth certificate alone is not considered sufficient proof of U.S. citizenship, and parents will need to provide additional documentation to obtain a passport, SSN, or federal benefits for their child.
  • At least one parent would need to prove their own citizenship or eligible immigration status when applying for these documents or benefits on their U.S.-born child’s behalf.
  • Federal agencies would verify parental status during or after birth registration.
  • Federal documents recognizing U.S. citizenship are not issued to children whose parents lack qualifying status.

“Ending birthright citizenship by fiat in contravention of several existing court challenges is an effort destined for failure. In the meantime, it will only create chaos and confusion in many households already struggling to navigate our broken immigration system.” — Erik Finch | Director of Global Operations, Boundless Immigration | Former USCIS Officer

Implications for Individuals and Families

Restricted birthright citizenship would have profound consequences on individuals and families:

  • Family Planning and Uncertainty: Legal ambiguities would likely deter many immigrant and mixed-status families from having children in the U.S., leading some to delay or reconsider building their families there.
  • Risk of Statelessness: Children denied citizenship at birth — especially if their parents’ home countries cannot confer nationality — could become stateless, facing lifelong barriers to education, healthcare, travel, and legal protection.
  • Reduced Access to Services: Even the threat of this policy’s implementation is likely to discourage families from seeking healthcare or essential public services, worsening health and welfare outcomes.
  • Bureaucratic and Legal Challenges: Stricter documentation rules could cause errors, delays, or denials, increasing stress and potential legal limbo for families.

Implications for Employers

Employers that depend on global talent could face serious challenges:

  • Recruitment and Retention: Uncertainty around children’s citizenship may deter skilled foreign professionals from working in or staying in the U.S.
  • HR Complexity and Compliance: Varied state laws could complicate HR, payroll, and benefits administration, requiring greater investment in immigration support for employees and their families.
  • Risk of Discrimination: Increased scrutiny of family and citizenship status raises the risk of accidental anti-discrimination violations and workplace unfairness.
  • Employee Wellbeing and Productivity: Ongoing anxiety about family status can lower morale, productivity, and long-term workforce stability, ultimately impacting company competitiveness.

Broader Social and Economic Implications

Fewer foreign-born residents and their U.S.-citizen children would reduce population diversity, shrink the workforce, and limit innovation. Communities of color — especially Latino families — would be disproportionately affected, deepening existing inequalities and creating long-term disparities. Over time, this could lead to a rise in U.S.-born individuals without legal status or statehood, increasing poverty, exclusion, and instability.

In addition, the proposed policy could expand the undocumented immigrant population, strain the U.S. immigration system, and fuel long-term political tension. Denying birthright citizenship risks alienating immigrant communities, weakening social cohesion, and creating a stateless underclass with limited access to education, jobs, and stability.

Even as a proposal, the policy has already sparked confusion and anxiety, leading some families to avoid essential services and underscoring the urgent need for clear guidance and community support.

Multiple court rulings have blocked the executive order, and it’s unclear if or when the administration’s plans will take effect. However, the government’s ongoing preparations suggests the issue will remain a priority for the Trump administration.


The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and state attorneys general have called the order unconstitutional and vowed to continue fighting it in court. Immigration advocates have reassured families that, for now, children born in the U.S. remain U.S. citizens regardless of their parents’ status, and no immediate action is required.

Source: Trump Administration Releases New Plans to Enforce Birthright Citizenship Order

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Change to Birthright Citizenship Would Affect Visa Holders, Too

2025/01/23 Leave a comment

One of the better overviews, covering the politics, legal aspects and operational practicalities (some familiar to Canadian issues under the Conservative government in 2012):

President Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship declares that babies born to many temporary residents of the United States — not just those in the country illegally — must be denied automatic citizenship, a dramatic rejection of rights that have been part of the Constitution for more than 150 years.

If the courts do not block the order, babies born to women living legally, but temporarily, in the United States — such as people studying on a student visa or workers hired by high-tech companies — will not automatically be recognized by the federal government as U.S. citizens if the father is also not a permanent resident.

Aides to Mr. Trump had told reporters on Monday morning that the order would apply to “children of illegal aliens born in the United States.” In fact, the language in the order Mr. Trump signed, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” goes much further.

“It’s a shocking attack on people in this country who are here lawfully, played by the rules and are benefiting the country,” said David Leopold, the chair of the immigration practice at the law firm UB Greensfelder. “We’re talking about people who are doing cutting-edge research in the United States, researchers, people who are here to help us.”

The order was part of a barrage of actions that Mr. Trump authorized on Monday to carry out his vision of a country with far less immigration. Despite claims he repeated on Monday that “I’m fine with legal immigration; I like it,” the president’s new orders would also severely curtail the options of those looking to enter the United States legally.

Many of the president’s closest advisers, including Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff and the architect of his immigration policy, have urged a tough line on birthright citizenship. During Mr. Trump’s first term, Mr. Miller and other aides pushed to make sure that immigrants could no longer establish what they call an “anchor” in the United States by having a baby who automatically becomes an American citizen.

In addition to targeting birthright citizenship, Mr. Trump on Monday barred asylum for immigrants seeking to cross the southern border, imposed an indefinite suspension of the legal refugee system, terminated several legal pathways for immigrants put in place by the Biden administration and declared the existence of an “invasion” from immigrants aimed at giving the federal government broad powers to stop all kinds of people from entering.

The executive order regarding birthright citizenship says that right will be denied for babies born to parents who are not citizens or permanent residents with green cards, including women who are “visiting on a student, work or tourist visa” if the father is not a citizen or a legal permanent resident. In that case, the order says, “no department or agency of the United States government shall issue documents recognizing United States citizenship.”

There are serious questions about how Mr. Trump’s administration would impose such a dramatic change in policy.

Currently, the citizenship of babies born in the United States is documented in a two-step process.

First, the state or territorial government will issue a birth certificate confirming where and when the birth took place. The birth certificate does not include any information about the immigration status of the baby’s parents.

Second, when that baby (or the parents, on the child’s behalf) applies for a passport, the birth certificate showing that the baby was born on U.S. soil is enough to prove citizenship. No other documentation is required.

Mr. Trump’s executive order indicates that in 30 days, all federal agencies will be required to confirm the immigration status of the parents before issuing documents like a passport.

Left unclear, however, is how that would be put into practice.

One option would be for state agencies to check the immigration status of parents and include that information on birth certificates. Then, when passports are requested, the federal government would be able to determine which babies qualify for automatic citizenship.

It could take years, however, for states to put in place a system that checks the immigration status of all parents — assuming they are willing to do so. The federal government could establish guidelines for the required information, but it would most likely be up to the states to decide how and whether to gather that data from parents when they issue a birth certificate.

If the states do not overhaul the birth certificate process, the federal government could seek to enforce Mr. Trump’s order by requiring people applying for passports to present both a birth certificate and proof of their parents’ citizenship status when they were born.

That could become extremely cumbersome, legal experts said, particularly for people with complicated family dynamics or missing legal documents.

Several White House officials did not respond to questions seeking clarification about how the order might be carried out.

Legal scholars and immigration advocates said on Tuesday that they were stunned by the breadth of the order.

Advocates are hoping that judges will step in and put it on hold before it is set to take effect on Feb. 20. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit in federal court in New Hampshire on Monday night challenging the order, just hours after the president signed it.

And on Tuesday, attorneys general from 22 states and two cities sued Mr. Trump to block the executive order. Rulings by either judge could temporarily suspend the order, prompting what could be a monthslong legal battle that could end up before the Supreme Court.

“It’s very clear that they mean to double down on their nativistic anti-immigrant agenda, and that denying citizenship to children born in the U.S. has got to be a core part of their plan,” said Anthony Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U. “If we were to repeal birthright citizenship, it would create a legal vehicle for intergenerational stigma and discrimination that would undo the very core of this grand American experiment.”

Birthright citizenship in the United States was put in place after the Civil War to allow Black people to be citizens. The 14th Amendment says that “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.” Before the amendment was ratified in 1868, even free Black men and women could not become citizens.

Mr. Trump argues that his administration is within its rights to interpret what the writers of the amendment meant.

“The 14th Amendment has never been interpreted to extend citizenship universally to everyone born within the United States,” his executive order said.

Many lawyers say that is flatly wrong. In their legal brief, the A.C.L.U.’s lawyers argued that the meaning of the 14th Amendment had been settled law for more than 125 years. They cited an 1898 case called United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which they said the Supreme Court “emphatically rejected the last effort to undercut birthright citizenship.”

“The executive order is certainly unconstitutional,” said Cecillia Wang, the A.C.L.U.’s national legal director. “It’s fair to say that if the court were to uphold Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order, it would lose all legitimacy in the eyes of the people and in the history books.”…

Source: Change to Birthright Citizenship Would Affect Visa Holders, Too

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ICYMI: Trump’s Racist Ban on Anti-Semitism | by Ian Buruma

2019/12/18 Leave a comment

Good commentary:

US President Donald Trump thinks that anti-Semitism is a serious problem in America. But Trump is not so much concerned about neo-Nazis who scream that Jews and other minorities “will not replace us,” for he thinks that many white supremacists are “very fine people.” No, Trump is more worried about US college campuses, where students call for boycotts of Israel in support of the Palestinians.

Trump just signed an executive order requiring that federal money be withheld from educational institutions that fail to combat anti-Semitism. Since Jews are identified in this order as a discriminated group on the grounds of ethnic, racial, or national characteristics, an attack on Israel would be anti-Semitic by definition. This is indeed the position of Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, who believes that “anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

There are, of course, as many forms of anti-Semitism as there are interpretations of what it means to be Jewish. When Trump and his supporters rant in campaign rallies about shadowy cabals of international financiers who undermine the interests of “ordinary, decent people,” some might interpret that as a common anti-Semitic trope, especially when an image of George Soros is brandished to underline this message. Trump even hinted at the possibility that the liberal Jewish human rights promoter and philanthropist was deliberately funding “caravans” of refugees and illegal aliens so that they could spread mayhem in the US. In Soros’s native Hungary, attacks on him as a cosmopolitan enemy of the people are unmistakably anti-Semitic.

Conspiracy theories about sinister Jewish power have a long history. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Russian forgery published in 1903, popularized the notion that Jewish bankers and financiers were secretly pulling the strings to dominate the world. Henry Ford was one of the more prominent people who believed this nonsense.

The history of extreme anti-Zionism is not so long. In the first years of the Jewish state, Israel was popular among many leftists, because it was built on socialist ideas. Left-wing opinion in Europe and the United States began to turn against Israel after the Six-Day War in 1967, when Arab territories were occupied by Israeli troops. More and more, Israel came to be seen as a colonial power, or an apartheid state.

One may or may not agree with that view of Israel. But few would deny that occupation, as is usually the case when civilians are under the thumb of a foreign military power, has led to oppression. So, to be a strong advocate for Palestinian rights and a critic of Israeli policies, on college campuses or anywhere else, does not automatically make one an anti-Semite. But there are extreme forms of anti-Zionism that do. The question is when that line is crossed.

Some would claim that it is anti-Semitic to deny Jews the right to have their own homeland. This is indeed one of the premises of Trump’s presidential order. There are also elements on the radical left, certainly represented in educational institutions, who are so obsessed by the oppression of Palestinians that they see Israel as the world’s greatest evil. Just as anti-Semites in the past often linked Jews with the US, as the twin sources of rootless capitalist malevolence, some modern anti-Zionists combine their anti-Americanism with a loathing for Israel.

In the minds of certain leftists, Israel and its American big brother are not just the last bastions of racist Western imperialism. The idea of a hidden Jewish capitalist cabal can also enter left-wing demonology as readily as it infects the far right. This noxious prejudice has haunted the British Labour Party, something its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, has consistently failed to recognize.1

In short, anti-Zionism can veer into anti-Semitism, but not all critics of Israel are anti-Zionist, and not all anti-Zionists are prejudiced against Jews.

Quite where people stand on this issue depends heavily on how they define a Jew – a source of endless vagueness and confusion. According to Halakha, or Jewish law, anyone with a Jewish mother, or who has converted to Judaism, is Jewish. That is the general Orthodox view. But more liberal Reform Jews allow Jewish identity to pass through the father as well.

On the other hand, while most Orthodox Jews consider a person to be Jewish even if they convert to another religion, Reform Jews do not. Israel’s Law of Return grants “every Jew” the right to immigrate, but refrains from defining Jewishness. Since 1970, even people with one Jewish grandparent have been eligible to become Israeli citizens. In the infamous Nuremberg laws, promulgated by the Nazis in 1935, people with only one Jewish parent could retain German citizenship, while “full” Jews could not.

The whole thing is so complicated that Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist, once sought to simplify the matter as follows: “Who is a Jew? Everyone who is mad enough to call himself or herself a Jew, is a Jew.”

There is, in any case, something ill-conceived about the stress on race and nationhood in Trump’s order on combating anti-Semitism. Israel is the only state claiming to represent all Jews, but not all Jews necessarily identify with Israel. Some even actively dislike it. Trump’s order might suggest that such people are renegades, or even traitors. This idea might please Israel’s current government, but it is far from the spirit of the Halakha, or even from the liberal idea of citizenship.

Defining Jews as a “race” is just as much of a problem. Jews come from many ethnic backgrounds: Yemenite, Ethiopian, Russian, Moroccan, and Swedish Jews are hard to pin down as a distinctive ethnic group. Hitler saw Jews as a race, but that is no reason to follow his example.

To combat racism, wherever it occurs, is a laudable aim. But singling out anti-Semitism in an executive order, especially when the concept is so intimately linked to views on the state of Israel, is a mistake. Extreme anti-Zionists may be a menace; all extremists are. But they should be tolerated, as long as their views are peacefully expressed. To stifle opinions on campuses by threatening to withhold funds runs counter to the freedom of speech guaranteed by the US Constitution. This is, alas, not the only sign that upholding the constitution is not the main basis of the current US administration’s claim to legitimacy.

Source: Trump’s Racist Ban on Anti-Semitism | by Ian Buruma

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