Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
For the Trump administration, it doesn’t matter that more than 8 million people rejected its extremist policies—including on immigration—at last Saturday’s “No Kings” rallies. What’s his next move? Defending the constitutionality of his executive order to deny birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants or those temporarily in the United States.
These policies, including violent arrests, deportations, and detainment of families or children alone, all share a troubling core: they predominantly harm children.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of Trump v. Barbara on April 1. A ruling is expected this summer. To exert greater pressure, Trump attended the hearing in person.
Trump frames his executive order ending birthright citizenship as a strategy to stop undocumented immigration, but an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) found that it would have the opposite effect.
“New MPI-Penn State projections show that ending birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children with parents who are either unauthorized or are temporary immigrants (or a combination of the two) would increase the unauthorized population by an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and by 5.4 million by 2075. Each year, over the next 50 years, an average of about 255,000 children born on U.S. soil would start life without U.S. citizenship based on their parents’ legal status,” concludes the May 2025 analysis.
Trump promised to eliminate birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1868, which states 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.” The amendment was passed at the end of the Civil War to clarify the citizenship of newly freed slaves born in the United States.
The president and his team argue that those born in the United States to parents who are undocumented, or to people lawfully present on temporary visas such as tourists, students, or temporary workers, should not automatically obtain citizenship.
Trump believes he can act by decree and, to that end, issued an executive order on January 20, 2025, which has been blocked in several courts.
Experts and scholars agree that a constitutional amendment—not an executive order—would be the appropriate step, and that requires a two-thirds vote in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, followed by ratification by three-quarters of state legislatures. There does not appear to be the political will to amend the Constitution and deny citizenship by birthright.
The last time the Supreme Court ruled on the 14th Amendment was in 1898, in Wong Kim Ark v. United States, a case involving a young man born in California to Chinese immigrant parents who was denied entry into the country after a trip abroad. The high court ruled in favor of Ark, affirming that, regardless of the parents’ citizenship, anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen.
But Ark’s parents were legal permanent residents, not undocumented immigrants. There has been no Supreme Court ruling specifically on children born to undocumented parents. It is currently standard practice that children born in the United States are U.S. citizens, even if their parents are undocumented or temporarily present under visas such as those for tourists or students.
A coalition of national organizations, led by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), sued the Trump administration over the executive order.
If the Supreme Court rules in Trump’s favor, 255,000 children born annually in the United States could be denied citizenship and left in uncertainty because of their parents’ status.
Trump’s war on birthright citizenship is one of the many avenues he uses to attack immigrants, from undermining asylum laws to eliminating programs like humanitarian parole and TPS.
This case extends Trump’s attack from immigrants to American children themselves, targeting those born here solely because of their parents’ legal status.
Further proof that immigration is Trump’s excuse to launch a frontal assault on demographic changes he cannot stop—changes that have provided the United States with a diversity that contributes to its progress. The very same diversity that Trump and MAGA view as a threat to their Anglo-Saxon race and their own existence.
The original Spanish version is here.
