On his first day in office, President Trump issued an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship in the United States. The order is blatantly unconstitutional, flying in the face of the 14th Amendment’s clear guarantee that everyone born in the U.S. is citizen.
It also threatens serious harm to Latinos in particular and the broader American community in general — as many briefs filed in the recent Supreme Court challenge to the order show. If the order were ever put into effect, it would deny children access to constitutional protections and important services, while paving the way for more deportations.
Although the order remains blocked while the Court decides the case, these briefs and other recent studies remind us to remain vigilant about the very real risks that the administration’s attacks on citizenship pose.
Latino communities are especially exposed under Trump’s executive order. By its technical terms, the order would deny citizenship to future children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants and the children of parents residing in the country under temporary legal authorization, like student visas and work visas. That sets up the order to disproportionately impact Latino families.
One study that features in the briefs found that in the short-term, Latinos stand to make up almost 80 percent of all “unauthorized births” — or births by undocumented parents. By 2050, Latinos would comprise over 90 percent of “unauthorized people” born in the United States. This group stands to be very large: Scholars predict in another study that “at least 750,000 children will be born … to two undocumented or temporary immigrant parents” of any race or ethnicity in the next 20 years.
The order would deny future children constitutional rights that have been in place for centuries. The 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to all children born in the United States with only a few exceptions — and has since 1868. Longstanding federal statutes and Supreme Court case law have recognized this right as well. The executive order would end this if it were ever to take effect.
Losing those rights would create what LatinoJustice PRLDEF and 22 other organizations have called a “racialized immigration system,” where Latinos are disproportionately relegated to a lower class due to their citizenship status. Without citizenship, children would lose access to legal rights and protections, including protections from deportation — protections that are especially critical as the Trump administration ramps up its aggressive attempts to remove non-citizens from the country.
They would also be disqualified from numerous federal and state services and programs, according to a brief by local governments and leaders. For example, they would not qualify for federal insurance programs like Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program, also known as CHIP. Latino children’s health is threatened in this scenario. Without insurance, children without citizenship would be less likely to receive preventative care, such as health screenings and vaccines that protect them from preventable diseases.
Furthermore, according to the local governments and leaders, these children would lose access to federal nutrition assistance benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) — the “nation’s most important anti-hunger program.” Another brief by the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies explains that they could also lose their qualifications for lawful employment, eligibility for in-state tuition or financial assistance for their educations, and access to routine aspects of civic and economic life, such as obtaining driver’s licenses or purchasing houses.
As adults, these children could not vote or serve on juries. As LatinoJustice PRLDEF explains, it is “a threat to the institution of government itself” to hold a group of people to a country’s laws while “denying them the ability to participate in [the] democratic process” that shapes them.
And, in the worst-case scenario, a group of nonprofits and doctors warns in their brief, some children could become stateless. As stateless individuals, no nation would recognize them as citizens. And these children could end up deported to foreign countries where they have never lived.
But the Trump administration’s attempts to deny citizenship to newborns don’t just threaten Latinos in the United States. Combined with the administration’s aggressive push to deport non-citizens, these attempts threaten the broader American community of which Latinos are a part.
Latinos are critical to today’s labor market, as LatinoJustice PRLDEF and the other organizations explain. They make up 49 percent of the country’s foreign-born labor market. And undocumented Latino men are 26 percent more likely than U.S.-born men to serve in the labor force. They often fill essential roles that many Americans rely on, such as caregiving and manual labor in the agricultural and construction sectors. Trump’s citizenship and immigration policies risk leaving these jobs unfilled.
Latino immigrants also share in the country’s tax load. As the organizations further explain, “In 2022, immigrants — the majority of whom are Latino — paid over $579 billion” in taxes, and undocumented immigrants paid over $31 billion in Social Security and Medicare taxes. These tax dollars stand to shrink — if not outright disappear — under the Trump administration’s policies.
President Trump’s executive order threatens all these harms and more if it is ever allowed to go into effect.
For the time being, the courts have blocked it. The Supreme Court is expected to issue a final ruling on the order’s fate by July 4.
