ACLU calls Trump’s new executive orders on birthright citizenship doomed to fail in court
The American Civil Liberties Union is not impressed by the legal reasoning of Donald Trump’s new executive orders in which he is once again attempting to restrict birthright citizenship, just five weeks after the US supreme court struck a similar order he issued last year.
In a statement, the ACLU blasted the president’s attempted end-run around the supreme court decision and predicted that the new orders will not survive a court challenge.
“The Supreme Court already decided this issue: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution,” the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, Cody Wofsy, said. “Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one”.
Key events
Closing summary
This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the day, with just 897 to go. Here are the latest developments:
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One month after the United States supreme court struck down his first attempt to restrict the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US constitution, Donald Trump signed executive orders on Thursday that aim to deny US citizenship to children born in the United States to so-called “birth tourists”.
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The two new orders came just five weeks ago after the US supreme court struck down Trump’s previous order denying citizenship to the children of non-citizens, a right that has been guaranteed since the 14th amendment was ratified in 1868.
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The orders were part of a quixotic campaign Trump has waged for more than a decade, since he promised to eliminate the right at a 2015 campaign event.
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Despite an endorsement from Trump, congressman Andy Ogles, a virulently anti-Muslim Tennessee Republican, was in danger of losing his re-election bid to a primary challenger backed by the state’s governor, Bill Lee.
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Trump refused to confirm a Washington Post report that he told donors at a recent meeting that they need to help JD Vance win the 2028 presidential election.
Trump-backed Tennessee congressman Andy Ogles trails in Republican primary
Despite an endorsement from Donald Trump on Thursday, congressman Andy Ogles, a a virulently anti-Muslim Tennessee Republican, seems to be in danger of losing his re-election bid to a primary challenger backed by the state’s governor, Bill Lee.
With nearly three-quarters of the votes counted in the party’s primary on Thursday night, Ogles trails Charlie Hatcher, a former state commissioner of agriculture, by more than 5 points, according to a running tally from the Associated Press.
“Congressman Andy Ogles is doing a fantastic job representing the incredible people of Tennessee’s 5th Congressional District!” Trump wrote on his social media platform as Tennessee Republicans went to the polls on Thursday. “Andy Ogles my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election. Election Day for the Republican Primary is TODAY. GET OUT AND VOTE FOR ANDY”.
An Ogles defeat would be the second loss of a Trump-backed candidate in a Republican primary this week.
Undeterred by a decade of failure, Trump’s obsessive campaign against birthright citizenship goes on, and on
The executive orders signed on Thursday by Donald Trump, in which he tries, again, to undermine the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US constitution reaffirmed by the supreme court just five weeks ago, is part of a quixotic campaign he has waged for more than a decade.
At a Republican presidential primary campaign event in Orlando, Florida in November 2015, Trump hinted that he had a plan to end what he called the scourge of “anchor babies”, a derogatory term for children of undocumented immigrants born in the United States as citizens.
“You can’t come into the country- you’re illegal, you come down, you sit down, you have your baby, and we take care of the baby for the next 85 years!” Trump said. “Everybody says, ‘Well, you need a constitutional amendment; it’ll take 15 years; it’ll never happen’. You don’t, you don’t. You need a simple act of Congress. You might not even need that.”
If elected, Trump promised the crowd at a resort near Disney World, “the anchor baby, birthright citizenship, it’s over, not going to happen.”
Three years later, as president, Trump said in a televised interview with Jonathan Swan just before the 2018 midterms that he planned to issue an executive order to instruct federal agencies that children born in the United States to non-citizens were not entitled to US citizenship at birth.
“It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump told Swan in an interview excerpt posted online on 30 October 2018. “You can definitely do it with an act of Congress,” Trump added, incorrectly, “but now they’re saying I can do it just with an executive order.”
As Swan reported at the time, Trump’s claim that he could undo the birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the constitution was a minority view among legal scholars, but was supported by a then-obscure figure: John Eastman, who had argued for decades that the amendment granting citizenship to “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” should be read to exclude the children of people who are not US citizens when their child is born.
Eastman later claimed in a 2020 Newsweek op-ed that Kamala Harris was ineligible for the vice-presidency because she had no right to US citizenship at birth, since she was born in Oakland, California in 1964 to non-citizen parents who were, “subject to the jurisdiction” of their native lands of India and Jamaica.
In the 2018 interview, Trump called birthright citizenship “ridiculous,” and falsely asserted that the US is “the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” In fact, at least 30 nations grant citizenship this way. He also claimed that an executive order was in the process of being drafted.
Although that order did not materialize until the start of Trump’s second term, his obsession with casting doubt on the citizenship of children born in the US to foreign parents has had a clearly political element from the start.
After all, Trump’s original rise to political prominence was tied to his false claim that Barack Obama, born to an American mother and a Kenyan father in Honolulu, just two years after Hawaii became a state, might have been born outside the US.
Then, after Joe Biden picked Harris as his running mate in 2020, Trump repeatedly refused to confirm that she was eligible for an elected office open only to “a natural born Citizen.”
Instead, Trump called the question Eastman raised about Harris’s citizenship at birth in his Newsweek op-ed “very serious” and a potential “problem” for her. He also praised Eastman as “a very highly qualified, very talented lawyer” and called him “brilliant”.
Eastman, who went on to devise the fake electors scheme designed to keep Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election, and gave an inflammatory speech before the Capitol riot on January 6 2021, was finally disbarred by the California supreme court in April, based on “clear and convincing evidence that he advanced false claims about the 2020 presidential election to mislead courts, public officials, and the American public.”
ACLU calls Trump’s new executive orders on birthright citizenship doomed to fail in court
The American Civil Liberties Union is not impressed by the legal reasoning of Donald Trump’s new executive orders in which he is once again attempting to restrict birthright citizenship, just five weeks after the US supreme court struck a similar order he issued last year.
In a statement, the ACLU blasted the president’s attempted end-run around the supreme court decision and predicted that the new orders will not survive a court challenge.
“The Supreme Court already decided this issue: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution,” the deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, Cody Wofsy, said. “Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one”.
Trump refuses to confirm that he privately endorsed JD Vance for 2028 presidential race
Speaking to reporters on Thursday, Donald Trump refused to confirm a Washington Post report that he told donors at a recent Oval Office meeting that they need to help his vice-president, JD Vance, win the 2028 presidential election.
“At the end of the day, we need to elect JD,” Trump reportedly told the donors two weeks ago, the Post reported.
“Mr President,” a reporter asked, “there is a report that you told donors that they need to get JD Vance elected in 2028. Is that your official endorsement?”
“No,” Trump answered.
“I heard about it a little while ago,” Trump continued, apparently referring to the report published on Thursday. “I think he’s great, but we’re way too early to even be thinking about that.”
Trump orders his administration to deny entry to foreigners coming to US ‘for the purpose of giving birth on American soil’
The two new executive orders on birthright citizenship signed by Donald Trump on Thursday, just five weeks ago after the US supreme court struck down his previous order denying citizenship to the children of non-citizens, attempt to limit in two ways a right that has been enshrined in the constitution since the 14th amendment was ratified in 1868.
One order bars the entry of foreigners allegedly traveling to the US “for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”, without saying how, exactly, that determination is to be made. (It might be worth noting here that such a policy, had it been in effect in 2001, might well have prevented Folarin Balogun, who was born that year to a mother visiting New York from London, from being born a US citizen and going on to represent the US in this summer’s World Cup.)
The second order seeks to deny citizenship to the children of certain categories of non-citizens.
The order excludes children born to any non-citizen parent in the following categories:
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an alien enemy, “defined to include any member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization … or Specially Designated Global Terrorist”;
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foreign government employees, including: ambassadors; other embassy or consulate employees who are nationals of that foreign country; anyone employed by a foreign government in an official capacity;
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employees of international organizations that possess international-organization immunity;
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people “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship”.
The children of foreign ambassadors have long been excluded from birthright citizenship.
Somewhat redundantly, the second order also denies citizenship to the children of non-citizens “born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute”.
Trump gives wildly inaccurate account of 14th amendment to explain new orders restricting birthright citizenship
Speaking in the Oval Office earlier on Thursday, Donald Trump gave a wildly inaccurate account of the nature and timing of the 14th amendment to the US constitution, which enshrined the principle of birthright citizenship, as he sought to justify two new executive orders attempting to deny citizenship to a wider pool of children born on US soil to non-citizens.
As he discussed the orders, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” and “Ending Birth Tourism”, Trump called the supreme court’s decision to strike down his previous attempt to deny birthright citizenship through executive action “a very, very unfortunate decision.”
“So we’re, making adjustments because it’s very unfair,” the president said. “This was meant for the babies of slaves. It was right after – one week or two weeks after – the Civil war ended.”
In fact, General Robert E Lee surrendered the largest of the Confederate forces on 9 April 1865 at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. More than a year later, the 14th amendment was passed by Congress on 13 June 1866, and ratified on 9 July 9 1868.
Trump’s assertion that the framers of the amendment only intended it to apply to the children of former slaves was roundly rejected by the supreme court, not this year but in 1898, when the justices ruled 6-2 that Wong Kim Ark, who was born in San Francisco to parents who were both Chinese citizens, was a US citizen by birth.
Despite that well-known precedent, which was discussed at length during the recent supreme court deliberations over Trump’s first attempt to deny birthright citizenship to the children of non-citizens, the president’s adviser, Stephen Miller, insisted that Trump was right.
“As the president mentioned, the 14th amendment was passed exclusively in the aftermath of the Civil War to to ensure that the children of slaves would be citizens. It had no other meaning and purpose outside of that,” Miller said.
“They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” Trump added. “And we’re actually the only country, of size, I think just about the only country period, that does birthright citizenship.”
That too is wildly inaccurate. Thirty-two other countries, most in the western hemisphere, have birthright citizenship laws that are similar to US law, according to the Pew Research Center. About 50 more countries have more limited versions of birthright citizenship.
Trump signs new executive orders to deny US citizenship to children born to so-called “birth tourists”
One month after the United States supreme court struck down his first attempt to restrict the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US constitution, Donald Trump signed executive orders on Thursday that aim to deny US citizenship to children born in the United States to so-called “birth tourists”.
The orders, which have not yet been made public, apparently expand the definitions of children the White House deems ineligible for birthright citizenship and seek to ban “birth tourism”, which the president claimed on Thursday is practiced by “hundreds of thousands” of people.
That seems like a wildly inflated estimate. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate “puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.”
For context, it seems worth keeping in mind that Trump’s own father, Fred Trump, was born a US citizen in 1905 to a non-citizen mother who arrived in New York from Germany six months pregnant. The president’s Scottish-born mother, Mary Anne Trump, later gave birth to her first two children, the current president’s older siblings, in the US before becoming a US citizen herself.
Here’s a recap of the day so far
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Mitch McConnell announced today he has been discharged from the rehabilitation center where he’d been recovering after a fall left him hospitalized, extending the Republican senator’s weeks‑long absence from Capitol Hill. McConnell said he will continue his recovery at home. “On the advice of my doctors, I’ll maintain an intensive regimen of physical therapy from home during the state work period,” the senator said. “And I’ll continue to engage with my staff and colleagues on important Senate business.” More here
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Senator John Husted, a Republican from Ohio, has joined the chorus of lawmakers calling for GOP congressman Max Miller to resign amid a deluge of domestic abuse allegations. Husted, who is facing a competitive election in November, noted that Miller’s re-election bid for his US House seat in Ohio does not benefit his family. “I believe Max would be making the right decision to step aside as a candidate and resign from Congress to focus on what is in the best interest of his daughter,” Husted said in a statement. “Years from now, I believe he will look back and know it was the right choice for her.”
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On Truth Social, Donald Trump insisted that he was “extremely happy” with Pete Hegseth’s job performance as defense secretary, dismissing any clashes with the Pentagon leaders as “fake news”. “Everything has been extraordinary,” the president added. “Pete is highly respected within the Military, and has made tremendous improvements, including getting rid of DEI, and increasing recruitment to historic levels.” This comes after the Washington Post’s earlier report that the president grew frustrated with Hegseth last week at a meeting at Camp David about the extreme munitions shortages.
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Republicans on a Senate committee voted to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after a bitter hearing last week, where the retired public health official invoked the fifth amendment for fear of self-incrimination and possible prosecution by GOP lawmakers. The vote was adopted along party lines. Senator Rand Paul, the panel’s Republican chair, will now seek a full vote in the Senate, where he will need 60 votes, or possibly send the resolution directly the justice department – who will then determine whether to pursue criminal charges.
Trump repeats frustration about Pirro’s decision to drop reflecting pool vandalism case in NBC News interview
Donald Trump continued to express his frustration with Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, after she dropped the alleged vandalism charges against David Hearn – the Olympic canoeist accused of pool damage that has now been attributed to faulty work by a contractor.
In a phone interview with NBC News, Trump said that Pirro made “a terrible decision”.
“She said there was no vandalism. There was tremendous vandalism,” the president told the outlet. “So, she made a terrible mistake. I don’t understand why she did such a stupid thing.”
Earlier this week in the Oval Office, Trump said that Pirro “folded like an umbrella” when asked about his reaction to the justice department dismissing the case against Hearn, who faced a felony property destruction charge that carried a potential sentence of up to 10 years in prison and a $1,000 fine. Hearn pleaded not guilty last month.
Pirro said her office only received interior department records that showed the pool’s lining was already failing before Hearn touched the water. Government lawyers, in a motion, said the materials pointed to “a rushed and flawed installation process,” with repeated lining failures during construction and “extensive peeling” throughout the reflecting pool.
On Wednesday, Trump had also said he had yet to “make a determination” about whether Pirro would stay in her role.
