US President-elect Donald Trump said he plans to end birthright citizenship in the United States in an interview with NBC’s Kristen Welker on a Meet the Press episode that aired on Sunday, reiterating a position he has articulated earlier too,
Al Jazeera reports.
Were Trump to try to execute that plan once he takes office, it would involve undoing how the US has treated citizenship for more than 150 years.
When Welker asked Trump whether he still plans to end birthright citizenship on day one in office, Trump replied: “Yeah, absolutely.”
Birthright citizenship essentially means that anyone born in the US automatically becomes a US citizen, which includes children of undocumented immigrants or tourists and students on short-term visas.
He said he was willing to work with Democrats to keep “Dreamers”, who are undocumented people who arrived in the US as children and have lived in the country most of their lives.
However, Trump also said: “I don’t want to be breaking up families, so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back.” That would mean expelling legal US citizens — ostensibly so that their families are not separated.
