Trump Targets Birthright Citizenship and Calls for Military Role in Deportations

Both plans are an affront to America’s image as a nation of immigrants.

On Monday, President-elect Donald Trump shared a post written earlier this month by Tom Fitton, president of the conservative legal nonprofit Judicial Watch, that suggested the incoming Trump administration was "prepared to declare a national emergency" and "use military assets" to implement "a mass deportation program." Trump added, "TRUE!!!"

Stephen Miller, a top immigration adviser during the first Trump administration who has been tapped for a policy role in the second, told The New York Times last year that the military would construct "vast holding facilities" for detained migrants. State National Guard troops (along with local police officers) would be directed to carry out immigration enforcement, Miller explained, and Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act as a legal basis for deputizing the armed forces to arrest migrants.

Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt on Monday said the president-elect planned to "marshal every federal and state power necessary to institute the largest deportation operation of illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers in American history." Trump himself has suggested that 15 million to 20 million migrants might be unlawfully present in the U.S. and thus subject to his deportation operation (most estimates put the undocumented population at around 11 million). Whatever the discrepancy, it seems that Trump has more than just "illegal criminals, drug dealers, and human traffickers" in his sights.

The fact that Trump wants to use military assets to carry out deportations conveys just how disruptive, difficult, and even violent such an operation could be. Even if the administration deports a more modest 1 million people per year, as Vice President–elect J.D. Vance has suggested, people will be forcibly separated from their jobs, communities, and families in gut-wrenching ways.

A major question lingering over Trump's mass deportation plan is the extent to which it will target—and separate—families. Estimates vary, but between 4 million and 5 million U.S. citizen children live with at least one undocumented parent, and additional U.S.-born kids live with an undocumented family member. Incoming "border czar" Thomas Homan, when asked on 60 Minutes whether there is "a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families," answered, "Of course there is. Families can be deported together."

The incoming administration has other plans to target mixed–immigration status families. Officials intend "to stop issuing citizenship-affirming documents, like passports and Social Security cards, to infants born on domestic soil to undocumented migrant parents in a bid to end birthright citizenship," reported the Times. That amounts to "a de facto suspension of the Constitution," argued Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University.

The 14th Amendment provides that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." This is something that only a few dozen countries guarantee, and it is a key component of the idea that anyone can be an American. The Supreme Court found in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) that a child born on U.S. soil to Chinese immigrant parents had, in fact, become "at the time of his birth a citizen of the United States." Trump wants to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants via executive order, but it's not at all clear that he can do so (nor is it clear that Congress could do so through legislation). It would likely take a constitutional amendment, the success of which seems far-fetched.

Still, the next Trump administration appears to be banking on its ability to challenge longstanding aspects of the U.S. immigration system that it wasn't able to tackle the first time around. Getting the military involved in deportations, whatever form that takes, will be far more visible than the quieter administrative matter of withholding passports and Social Security cards from certain U.S.-born children, but both plans completely contradict America's image as a nation of immigrants.