President Donald Trump has declared that unless at least one parent of a newborn in the US is an American citizen or a green card holder, the child will not be an American citizen — a right that all those born in the US have enjoyed for much of the country’s history.
Trump’s decision will have life-altering implications for all those on a temporary visa status in US — including hundreds of thousands Indians who are on temporary work visas (H-1B and L1), on dependent visas (H4), study visas (F1), academic visitor visas (J1), or short term business or tourist (B1 or B2) visas. The decision will be applicable to all children born in the US from February 20, 30 days since the order.
There are over five million people of Indian-origin in America, a category that includes both Indian-Americans and Indians who continue to have Indian citizenship.
The order has already been challenged in courts in New Hampshire and Massachusetts and will not come into effect if stayed by the courts within the next month.
In one of his most radical executive orders issued on the first day of his second term, titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”, Trump said the Constitution was never interpreted to universally extend citizenship to all those born in the US.
Trump based his decision on an interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that critics, legal experts and civil liberties organisations claim will not hold in court. The amendment states, “All persons born or naturalised in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Trump, in his executive order, picked on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to claim that those born in US but not subject to US jurisdiction were thus not eligible for US citizenship.
The order stated that the right of citizenship did not extend to two categories, for they were not subject to the US jurisdiction. These included, first, anyone whose “mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth”. And, second, it included anyone whose “mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth”.
Building on this argument, Donald Trump declared in the order that it was now the policy of the US that no department or agency would issue documents recognising American citizenship to all those in these two categories. Trump instructed the Secretary of State, secretary of homeland security, attorney general, and the commissioner of social security to take “appropriate measures to ensure that the regulations and policies of their respective departments and agencies are consistent with this order”.
The decision comes just a month after another controversy rocked Trump’s own America First movement with implications for Indians. A far-Right Trump supporter criticised the H-1B programme and engaged in racist attacks against Indians, even as Trump’s top supporters in the tech world, including Elon Musk, backed the H-1B programme as essential to bring the best talent to America. Trump eventually backed the programme. But Vivek Ramaswamy, who had been delegated to lead the department of government efficiency with Musk and put out a critical post on how American culture was responsible for its mediocrity while backing H-1B, lost goodwill among Trump’s base and has now lost his job as the co-head of DOGE. Trump’s more hardline advisors, including his homeland security advisor, Stephen Miller are understood to be against legal migration at current levels.
Milan Vaishnav, the director of the South Asia programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a scholar who has extensively studied the Indian diaspora in the US, said that the executive order was a “dramatic reinterpretation” of the 14th Amendment that grants citizenship to all individuals born on US soil, irrespective of who their parents are.
“The executive order is far more sweeping than many analysts had expected. It goes so far as to prohibit US citizenship for children born to people living in the United States on temporary work, student, or tourist visas. This will affect lakhs of Indian nationals residing in the US, not least children of H-1B visa holders and those waiting in the lengthy queue for permanent residency,” Vaishnav said.
In a four-page brief published on Tuesday morning, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the country’s pre-eminent human rights organisation which also filed the legal challenge in New Hampshire, slammed Trump, terming his attack on a “fundamental constitutional protection and one that is central to equity and inclusion” and claiming that every attack on birthright citizenship in the US had its roots in racism.
“The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was introduced in the wake of the Civil War to establish that all persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are U.S. citizens, and to guarantee equal rights to all citizens and equal protection of the laws to all persons under U.S. jurisdiction. It is the cornerstone of civil rights in the United States, and a direct response to previous legal precedent that restricted who could be a citizen and who was a slave,” it said.
The amendment was a response to a 1857 Supreme Court judgement — Dred Scott v Sandford — that declared that children of slaves weren’t US citizens.
ACLU has alleged that Trump’s executive order has no legal basis and is unconstitutional. “There is no carve out in the Fourteenth Amendment for specific immigration statuses.” It has also warned that if implemented, the order will create a “permanent underclass of potentially stateless people” and deny to children born to immigrant parents in the US the right to get documents and passport, the right to access educational and health and other benefits, the right to vote. It will also lead to “stigma, racial profiling, and questioning of citizenship of all sorts of families”, besides causing enormous bureaucratic confusion.
Trump’s citizenship order was one among the many that dealt with the question of border security and migration. But while those sought to apply existing law and rules, or interpret it in a more militant manner, to stem the flow of illegal immigrants, the executive order pertaining to citizenship was based on a different reading of the Constitution itself and affected legal immigrants.