Legal Features
The Rutherford Institute’s Statement on the Trump Administration’s Proposed Executive Order Denying Birthright Citizenship
President Trump’s announcement that he intends, through issuance of an Executive Order, to terminate birthright citizenship, which confers citizenship to children of noncitizens who are born in the U.S., is in direct conflict with the plain terms of the United States Constitution, namely the Fourteenth Amendment, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
No reputable legal authority supports the idea that a President may, through the fiat of an Executive Order, abolish and ignore the unmistakable language of the Constitution granting citizenship to all persons born in the United States. Moreover, the idea that Congress may enact a law with the effect of amending the Constitution to terminate birthright citizenship, as Sen. Lindsey Graham has suggested, is only slightly less implausible. “The very nature of our free government makes it completely incongruous to have a rule of law under which a group of citizens temporarily in office can deprive another group of citizens of their citizenship.” Afroyim v. Rusk, 387 U.S. 253, 267-68 (1967).
“Any attempt to terminate birthright citizenship through issuance of an Executive Order or legislative act is a craven act of defiance against the Constitution and laws of the United States,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “As a nation, we must reject and denounce this kind of naked abuse of power, especially when it endangers the fundamental guarantees set forth in the Constitution.”
October 30, 2018 • Rutherford Institute Denounces Trump Administration’s Unconstitutional Proposal to Terminate Birthright Citizenship by Way of Executive Order
