On day one of his second term, President Donald Trump issued a flurry of draconian executive orders on immigration, including seeking to end birthright citizenship, a longtime objective of anti-immigrant entities and white nationalists.
Trump underscored his campaign commitment to a xenophobic agenda and delighted anti-immigrant extremists with his round of executive orders that came after Monday’s inauguration.
One of Trump’s orders attempts to end the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to people born on U.S. soil, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution and has been settled law for more than a century. Under the banner of “protecting the meaning and value of American citizenship,” the order requires federal officials to deny citizenship to children born in the United States even when the birth parents’ “presence in the United States was lawful but temporary.”
Today, Judge John C. Coughenour of the Western District of Washington temporarily blocked the order, calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”
Attacking birthright citizenship has been a decades-long tactic of the organized anti-immigrant movement. The late John Tanton, a white nationalist, population alarmist and architect of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement, called to “end the absurdity of granting U.S. citizenship simply by virtue of being born on U.S. soil” in a book published in 1994 titled The Immigration Invasion. As revealed by a cache of his personal memos, Tanton sought to curb immigration to the U.S. in order to preserve a clear “European-American majority.”
Tanton’s flagship organization, the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, has long pushed for repealing birthright citizenship. FAIR laid out its anti-immigrant wish list for the 119th Congress (2025-27), which included a call to interpret the 14th Amendment to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents without lawful immigration status.
FAIR’s legal arm, the Immigration Reform Law Institute, also an SPLC-designated anti-immigrant hate group, supported Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship, claiming in a December 2024 op-ed, “Foreigners willing to break our laws, and not Americans, have been deciding in a major way who are and will be U.S. citizens.”
FAIR President Dan Stein congratulated Trump and welcomed his “carrying out his mandate” on immigration.
Trump’s birthright citizenship order was immediately challenged. Immigration lawyer and advocate Hassan M. Ahmad noted that while such a proposal is ridiculous from Trump, there are “dangers” because it sends the message that “American citizenship is being devalued.”
“If it can be revoked or reinterpreted by mere executive order, it’s less valuable than a
Costco membership,” Ahmad wrote in a statement. “Certainly, these attacks on US citizens are part of the administration’s relentless attacks on all Americans, aspiring or otherwise.”
He added: “This isn’t ‘conservative’ or an ‘alternative viewpoint’ or a ‘minority position.’ It’s white nationalism. It’s about racial purity, not economics or national security. Let’s not be afraid to call this what it is.”
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations that filed suit against the Trump administration, said in a statement: “Birthright citizenship is part of what makes the United States the strong and dynamic nation that it is. This order seeks to repeat one of the gravest errors in American history, by creating a permanent subclass of people born in the U.S. who are denied full rights as Americans.”
The order also narrowly defines the terms “mother” and “father” as the immediate male and female “biological progenitors” of children. The language suggests a strong association between citizenship and biological reproduction, a common theme in “white genocide” and “great replacement”-style rhetoric to assert white people have an obligation to have children to stave off demographic threats from non-white people.
Trump has tapped anti-immigrant extremist Stephen Miller to return to the White House as deputy chief of staff and the president’s homeland security adviser. Hatewatch has previously reported on Miller’s affinity for white nationalism and ties to extremist groups and figures.
“This authoritarian attempt to end birthright citizenship by fiat is motivated by a desire to equate America with whiteness,” said Efrén C. Olivares, director of litigation and advocacy at the SPLC. “The order seeks to adopt a white nationalist wish list into policy, but it flies in the face of more than a century of settled law.”
In his inaugural address, Trump furthered the dehumanizing narrative that the U.S. is being invaded by migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom are people of color. Claims of migrants flooding and invading the U.S. have been longtime talking points among anti-immigrant and white nationalist circles and fit into racist “great replacement”-style thinking. The assailant responsible for the 2019 racialized mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, claimed in a digital footprint left before the attack that it was in response to the so-called “Hispanic invasion” he believed to be happening in the state.
Trump also used “invasion” rhetoric to justify orders and policies to further militarize immigration enforcement. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) called Trump’s executive orders “unconstitutional, illegal, and cruel.” An NILC statement said the result of Trump’s efforts to entangle the military with immigration enforcement measures “will almost certainly be more families separated, more migrants harmed and killed, and more disruptions to the economy from unnecessary border restrictions and closures.”
The anti-immigrant hate group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) helped lay the groundwork for militarizing immigration enforcement. On Jan. 11, CIS senior legal fellow George Fishman published an article calling on Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deploy the military to help in cases of insurrection and civil disorder, to aid in mass deportation efforts.
Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told Democracy Now! that Trump’s efforts to use military resources for immigration and border policies “is a massive abuse of emergency power.”
Trump has also set his sights on ending aid to some of those most vulnerable with an executive order pausing and limiting refugee settlement. Over 1,600 Afghan refugees had their flights canceled after the order, per reports.
“We are appalled by the callousness that this administration is taking toward victims of violence and persecution,” Mark Hetfield, president of refugee advocacy group HIAS, said in a statement following the order. “Refugee resettlement is a safe and legal pathway, it is a longstanding, bipartisan tradition, it strengthens our national security, and it brings enormous economic and cultural benefits to our communities.”
Trump also looked to reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy and end the CBP One app, a government-run program aiding migrants. CIS’ Andrew Arthur claimed Trump to be “hot out of the gate” on immigration.
Monday’s executive orders come ahead of fears around mass deportation efforts planned by the Trump administration. Trump tapped former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) chief Tom Homan to serve as border czar and oversee these operations. Homan, the mastermind behind Trump’s previous family separation policies, spent the Biden years associating with such anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant hate groups as The United West and Immigration Reform Law Institute. He is also the CEO of a nonprofit that has reportedly been part of a misinformation network profiting off anti-immigrant animus.
The anti-immigrant group FAIR recently tapped former sheriff and antigovernment conspiracy theorist Mark Lamb as a law enforcement adviser to help with the group’s outreach to law enforcement. One of FAIR’s strategies is to enlist local law enforcement such as sheriffs to serve as an extension of ICE’s detention and deportation machine.
As images show the humanity and sorrow of those impacted by Trump’s draconian immigration policies, figures associated with the anti-immigrant movement are trying to discredit the real-life impact on people’s lives. CIS fellow Todd Bensman penned an article calling the alleged abuse of immigrants “injustice porn.” He claims injustices against immigrants, including alleged sexual abuse and drowning, go viral “before they can be proven false.”
At the time of writing, at least six separate lawsuits had been filed against the executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship. While Judge Coughenour sided with the plaintiffs in his ruling today and temporarily blocked the order, the litigation may take months to be resolved. Whether babies born in the United States while the litigation is pending will have their U.S. citizenship recognized remains to be seen.
Picture at top: Immigrant rights supporters chant before they march to a detention center on International Migrants Day on Dec. 18, 2024, in Los Angeles, California, ahead of President-elect Trump’s planned wave of migrant deportations. (Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images)