Trump Just Released His Plan to Revoke Birthright Citizenship. It's Worse Than Imagined.

[sheshe2]

Ever since Donald Trump vowed to end birthright citizenship for the children of many immigrants, one question has loomed: How could the executive branch possibly implement such a sweeping rollback of constitutional rights? The United States has granted birthright citizenship to virtually all children born on its soil since 1868, when the 14th Amendment enshrined that guarantee into law. What would it look like for the government to abruptly change course, adopting a radically different system of citizenship through presidential decree? How could the Trump administration identify the roughly 150,000 babies born each year who would no longer receive their fundamental right of citizenship? What penalty would it impose on these infants, some of whom would be rendered literally stateless?

For months, federal courts blocked the Trump administration from developing any such plans, finding the executive order unconstitutional from top to bottom. In June, however, the Supreme Court expressly permitted the government to begin “developing and issuing public guidance about the executive’s plans to implement” Trump’s order. Acting on that decision, an immigration agency released the first stage of its “implementation plan” last Friday. It shocks the conscience. In dry bureaucratic language, the memo outlines a plan to revoke citizenship from the children of both immigrants who lack permanent legal status and many lawful residents, including visa holders, Dreamers, and asylum-seekers. It envisions intrusive federal review of parents’ papers—quite possibly in the hospital, before or shortly after birth—to gauge the newborn’s legal status. And it paves the way for people who spend their entire lives in the United States to be deported to countries in which they’ve never stepped foot, or to be condemned to the limbo of statelessness. To this administration, inflicting these unconstitutional harms isn’t a mere byproduct of the plan. It’s the whole point.

snip

To that end, USCIS declared flatly that the children of immigrants who are “unlawfully present” will “no longer be U.S. citizens at birth.” They will, instead, inherit the status of their parents, rendering them detainable and deportable as infants and throughout their lives. There is no indication that the government will provide some grace period before snatching up and imprisoning this new underclass of noncitizen babies; they are apparently subject to arrest from the moment of birth.

MUCH MORE https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/trump-birthright-citizenship-supreme-court-ice-maternity-ward.html

I weep for this country and its future.