President Wants to Use Executive Order to End Birthright Citizenship

President Trump said he was preparing an executive order that would nullify the long-accepted constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship in the United States, his latest attention-grabbing maneuver days before midterm congressional elections as he has sought to activate his base by vowing to clamp down on immigrants and immigration.

“We’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States for 85 years, with all of those benefits,” Mr. Trump told Axios during an interview that was released in part on Tuesday, making a false claim. “It’s ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. And it has to end.”

In fact, at least 30 other countries, including Canada, Mexico and many others in the Western Hemisphere, grant automatic birthright citizenship, according to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that supports restricting immigration and whose work Mr. Trump’s advisers often cite.

But Mr. Trump’s plan met with swift pushback from some even in his own party on Tuesday. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, who is retiring, said in an interview that the president “obviously” cannot eviscerate birthright citizenship by executive order.

“You obviously cannot do that,” Ryan told WVLK, a radio station in Lexington, Ky. “I’m a believer in following the plain text of the Constitution, and I think in this case, the 14th Amendment is pretty clear, and that would involve a very, very lengthy constitutional process.”

Mr. Ryan compared the idea of doing so to Barack Obama’s 2012 action to grant work permits and deportation reprieves to some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, which Republicans, including Mr. Trump, vociferously protested as a naked abuse of presidential power.

Doing away with birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants was an idea Mr. Trump pitched as a presidential candidate, but there is no clear indication that he would be able to do so unilaterally, and attempting to would be certain to prompt legal challenges. The consensus among legal scholars is that he cannot, but Mr. Trump and his allies are eager to test it in the Supreme Court.

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