Trump fulfills “birthright citizenship” campaign promise + more executive orders

author Published by Jeremy Beck

President Trump signed a bevy of immigration-related executive orders on his first day in office. We’ll have more to tell you about these orders in the days ahead. You’ll see in our short explanations below that Trump’s first actions focus on ending what NumbersUSA Co-CEO Roy Beck calls “the federal government’s recent practice of the wholesale flooding of labor markets and local communities with uninvited foreign workers.”

These orders will help the Trump administration immediately reestablish a credible enforcement system, at least for the next four years, while we mobilize citizens to persuade Congress to work to enact lasting reforms.

But first, let’s start with one that won’t have any immediate effect on the numbers, but is critically important nonetheless.

Limiting Automatic Birthright Citizenship

The official title of the executive order is “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” Before the border surge, the U.S. was automatically issuing citizenship to an estimated 400,000 children born each year to parents who were either tourists from other countries or in the U.S. illegally. Ending this practice is one of NumbersUSA’s Six Great Immigration Solutions. (Another estimated 350,000 are born every year to at least one parent who is in the U.S. illegally but also one parent who has permanent residency or U.S. citizenship.  NumbersUSA has always argued for automatic citizenship for these births, and Trump’s order agrees with our position.) 

https://twitter.com/numbersusa/status/1881703028597895259?s=46&t=rzyM3o3RdqH-3pnUaSZj0w

President Trump was elected by voters who overwhelmingly rejected the historic wave of inadmissible aliens released into the country during the Biden administration. This was arguably the issue that decided the election. And yet any attempt to repair the damage done by the border crisis will be undermined as long as the government is issuing U.S. citizenship to every child born to an inadmissible alien who has been released. Moreover, once that child turns 21, they can take advantage of our chain migration policies to sponsor the parents who violated U.S. immigration laws in the first place.

President Trump’s order would end automatic citizenship for children who do not have at least one parent who is a U.S. citizen or a legal permanent resident. The order will be immediately blocked in lower federal courts. Roughly two dozen states have already sued to stop the administration. We at NumbersUSA have always said that the debate over whether or not automatic birthright citizenship (a practice only the U.S. and Canada practice among developed nations) is required by the 14th Amendment is one that will have to be answered by the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Trump has fulfilled a major campaign promise, drawn attention to the issue, and is doing his part to move the debate toward a conclusion.

Reinstating “Remain In Mexico” 

The Migration Protection Protocols (or MPP) is better known as “Remain In Mexico.” As the nickname suggests, the MPP required asylum seekers at the Southern border to wait in Mexico until their case was heard. Most asylum seekers decided to go home, rather than wait in Mexico while their illegitimate case was decided. President Biden ended the program. The House passed a bill in the last Congress to reinstate it but the Senate never picked it up. Now, President Trump is reinstating it. We do not want to roll the dice on future administrations keeping the program in place. Congress needs to pass a law to make “Remain In Mexico” permanent.

Ending the “CBP One” App

Millions of Americans who followed immigration over the last few years were shocked to learn that the U.S. government had been running a cell phone app where inadmissible aliens could schedule their appointments to be released into the United States. More than 900,000 inadmissible aliens have used the app to get released into the country. This absurd program is now over. Congress should pass a law to make sure it never comes back.

Terminating all “categorical parole” programs

As part of his “Securing Our Borders” executive action, President Trump directs the Secretary of Homeland Security to “Terminate all categorical parole programs that are contrary to the policies of the United States established in my Executive Orders, including the program known as the ‘Processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans [CHNV].’”

The vast majority of inadmissible aliens released into the country during the Biden administration (peaking at about 1 million people per year!) were done so through parole. Parole is a legal process but it is supposed to be granted on a case-by-case basis. The Biden-Harris administration granted parole to broad categories of people, essentially nullifying any legal limits on immigration Congress put in place.

One of those programs was the CHNV program mentioned above. Andrew R. Arthur at the Center for Immigration Studies gives the good, the bad, and the ugly on CHNV:

“According to CBP, through the end of December approximately 531,690 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans arrived by air and were granted two-year periods of parole under the program, despite the fact that Congress never authorized it.

“As I have explained in the past, CHNV parole is uniquely vulnerable to trafficking and exploitation, and in fact DHS paused the program last summer amidst fraud concerns.

“Dealing with the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries of the program here is the responsibility of ICE and Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan, but the good news for them is that the application web page for CHNV parole is now blank, with the words “Page Not Found” greeting the curious.”

Executive orders are only as good as the incumbent administration

Three of these actions should provide immediate relief at the border, and the fourth (birthright citizenship) would immediately start to provide relief in the interior if it were permitted to move forward. And there is more where they came from. Trump signed executive actions related to asylum, temporary protected status, and sanctuary cities to name a few. 

My colleague Andre Barnes likened these actions to the relief a patient feels after getting treated in the emergency room. It’s a good analogy. To take it a little further, let’s say our immigration system is the patient. The patient has been suffering from a serious credibility deficiency. The surgeon is in the room stabilizing the patient. As long as the surgeon is there, the patient will be stable. But the goal is for the patient to walk out of the hospital; to be healthy without the constant supervision of the surgeon. These executive orders are like a powerful medicine that is effective only as long as the patient keeps taking it. What the patient (immigration policy) needs is surgery (legislative reform) that will enable her to stand on her own.

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