Trump’s birthright citizenship attack the latest effort in obsessive campaign

For more than a decade, president has been fixated on trying to undermine a key constitutional right With a pair of executive orders on Thursday, Donald Trump has tried – once again – to undermine the guarantee of birthright citizenship, a right enshrined in the US constitution and reaffirmed by the supreme court just five weeks ago. The orders attempt to broaden the categories of children who would be ineligible for automatic US citizenship and ban so-called “birth tourism”, which the president claimed is practiced by “hundreds of thousands” of people. That estimate appears to be wildly inflated. According to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate “puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024”. It was the latest attack in a quixotic campaign that the US president has waged for more than a decade.

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