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Donald Trump has spent the past decade of his political career treating undocumented immigrants as the great modern American crisis — but he’s still working hard to create more.
In January, on the first day of his second term in office, the president signed an executive order that states that only people born to at least one parent with citizenship status or legal permanent residency are legal citizens, an order that flies directly in the face of the 14th Amendment right to citizenship by birth. The federal government was promptly sued by different groups, including a coalition of states, and the proposed order has been subject to nationwide injunctions. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Thursday in a case that could decide whether federal judges have the power to issue nationwide injunctions and, subsequently, whether the restrictions to citizenship could go into effect.
But the conservative justices seemed skeptical. It leaves open the possibility of allowing the order to go into effect, at least in some areas, and sets the stage for many of the approximately 150,000 babies born each year to undocumented immigrants on American soil to be denied citizenship — marking a dark new chapter in American history.
It makes sense that the Trump administration would continue its attacks on immigrants and immigrant rights: Every Trump campaign has been predicated on the notion that the country is under siege from hordes of immigrants and he’s the only one who can save us. And when he was elected for a second term, he tripled-down on his nativist instincts, vowing to conduct sweeping deportations of the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S.
But in another, stranger way, this move is deeply ironic. By denying citizenship to children of immigrants who would otherwise have it, Trump is creating thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of new undocumented immigrants every year. And that begs the question: What is the administration’s real agenda on citizenship?
The Trump administration has moved to end a Biden-era humanitarian parole program that allowed migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to live and work legally in the U.S. His administration also is trying to end temporary protected status for Venezuelans, a program for people from volatile countries, and even attempted to revoke student visas from college students who were involved in pro-Palestinian protests on campus. Federal judges have blocked Trump from ending the Biden-era program and TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans. And when dozens of students sued over visa revocations, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it was backtracking.
The administration has made cruel spectacles a cornerstone of its effort to conduct supposed mass deportations. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security sent a plane full of immigrant men to an infamous torture prison in El Salvador. Then there was the graduate student detained and arrested for the alleged crime of leading a pro-Palestinian protest who is still held in a prison thousands of miles from his family. But still, Trump is not actually doing mass deportations.
For the federal government, it’s a question of logistics. Where would you detain millions of people? Are there enough planes? And would community members still support Trump after watching their friends and neighbors get hauled away by federal agents? Then there’s the cost. An American Immigration Council report estimated that it would cost about $88 billion to deport 1 million immigrants each year.
Perhaps none of that matters to Trump because the real goal isn’t mass deportations but rather to turn immigrants into a second-tier, subjugated class of people.
Life is already extremely difficult without legal status. Undocumented immigrants are easier to exploit at work. The constant fear of deportation means they’re less likely to report dangerous work conditions or unfair pay practices. This notion is reflected in the fact that, according to Inequality.org, undocumented immigrants, despite doing a lot of essential jobs like construction and health care, make much less money than U.S.-born citizens. In fact, industries with a bigger share of immigrant workers tend to have lower wages overall.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization that focuses on immigration and related policies, most economists agree that immigrants are a net positive for the U.S. economy by expanding the labor force and increasing consumer spending.
And undocumented immigrants pay billions of taxes each year using tax identification numbers. (The Trump administration is now trying to exploit this fact by using that data to target immigrants for deportation.)
If Trump is able to fundamentally change who gets to be an American citizen, U.S.-born babies with undocumented parents will be born into a legal limbo. Around the world, people who are stateless, meaning they’re not a citizen of any country, are often denied the most basic of rights like the ability to go to school, get a job or access health care.
One of the best modern examples of what happens to people who are rendered stateless overnight comes from the Dominican Republic. In 2013, a Dominican court overturned the country’s birthright citizenship for the children of foreigners — and made it retroactive to 1929. The decision mostly affected the descendants of Haitians and revoked the citizenship of approximately 245,000 people. And though the country passed another law the following year in order to provide a path to citizenship to the tens of thousands of people rendered stateless, descendants of Haitians struggled to gain citizenship and are subject to human rights abuses, lack of education and inability to access medical care.
It’s not hard to imagine that this is the future Trump sees for the children born to undocumented immigrants should his birthright citizenship scheme get the green light from the Supreme Court.
Already, pregnant immigrants are worried about what life could look like for their children. “Hearing that news provoked a horrible stress in me, that still follows me to this day,” one woman told Reuters about the birthright citizenship executive order. “We feel as though she may be relegated to a class of population that are not identified with any country,” a pair of expectant parents told NPR.
It is politically useful to Trump to have a group of people with limited rights, vulnerable to exploitation, on whom he can throw blame for all the thorny societal issues that are difficult to actually solve. Unemployment is on the rise? That’s because an immigrant took your job. Government safety nets not doing enough? That’s because all the resources are going to immigrants. Feel unsafe or unstable in your community? That’s because of the threat of dangerous immigrant criminals allowed in the country.
There are other telling signals. Among Trump’s other actions in the first 100 days of his term were executive orders meant to punish big law firms, including those that have done pro-bono work on immigration and immigrant rights. The implication was clear: Do legal work on issues the administration doesn’t like and you may find yourself with a target on your back. In the interest of self-protection, many of those firms have folded to the administration and not only agreed to bring their diversity policies in line, but to do millions of dollars worth of pro-bono work for the administration itself. What little legal recourse immigrants had to advocate for their rights is being quietly siphoned away.
Perhaps the Trump administration, while constantly braying about mass deportations, had quietly revealed what the real plan was all along.
JD Vance provided hints on the campaign trail, during the height of frenzied racist rumors about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. A sizable number of migrants from Haiti had settled in the town of about 58,000 when a Facebook user falsely claimed that Haitians had taken a pet and consumed it. It set off a rumor so wild that Trump ended up repeating the lie on the debate stage last September.
Vance spent the entirety of the bizarre news cycle insisting that Haitians were doing something in Ohio and that’s why we needed to curb illegal crossings at the border. But there was just one problem — the majority of the Haitians in Springfield did have legal status. Some of them had temporary protected status, and others had come through the humanitarian parole program.
When presented with these facts, Vance alluded to what we see unfolding today.
“What is fundamentally illegal is for Kamala Harris to say we’re going to grant parole, not on a case-by-case basis, but to millions of illegal aliens who are coming to this country,” he told reporters in North Carolina last year referring to the Biden administration’s parole program.
“That does not magically make them legal because Kamala Harris waved the amnesty wand. That makes her border policy a disgrace, and I’m still going to call people illegal aliens.”
