President-elect Donald Trump has promised swift immigration action during his second term in office. He has repeatedly pledged to seal the U.S.-Mexico border and implement a mass deportation program targeting millions of people who are in the U.S. illegally.
On Dec. 8, in a wide-ranging interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Trump suggested he is considering deporting entire families, including children who are U.S. citizens with undocumented parents.
“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,” Trump said, echoing remarks his border czar Tom Homan made in October.
Multiple people on social media claim the president cannot legally deport U.S. citizens because doing so would be unconstitutional. Recent online search trends show many people online are wondering if this is true.
THE QUESTION
Is it unconstitutional to deport U.S. citizens?
THE SOURCES
- 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
- Afroyim v. Rusk
- Michelle Mittelstadt, director of communications and public affairs for the Migration Policy Institute
- Allen Orr, Jr., J.D., an immigration attorney and founder of Orr Immigration Law Firm P.C.
- Jean Lantz Reisz, J.D., co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic, and clinical associate professor of law at the USC Gould School of Law
- Maureen Sweeney, J.D., law school professor and director of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law
- Scott D. Pollock & Associates, P.C, an immigration law firm in Chicago, Illinois
THE ANSWER
Yes, deporting U.S. citizens is a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
WHAT WE FOUND
The president cannot deport U.S. citizens, including those with undocumented parents, because doing so would be unconstitutional, according to immigration law experts. The U.S. Constitution protects natural-born citizens from being deported by the government. But citizens may choose to renounce their citizenship voluntarily.
“It is unconstitutional to deport U.S. citizens,” said Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokesperson for the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
U.S. citizenship through birth, which is known as “birthright citizenship,” comes via the 14th Amendment, which was ratified after the Civil War to secure citizenship for newly freed Black Americans. It was later, after multiple court challenges, used to guarantee citizenship to all babies born on U.S. soil regardless of the citizenship of their parents.
Section 1 of the 14th Amendment reads:
“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Trump has repeatedly said he would attempt to end birthright citizenship through executive action in his second term. However, we previously found that the president cannot end birthright citizenship by executive order because it would also violate the Constitution.
Amending the Constitution would require congressional action and ratification by three-quarters of the states. Law experts agree that any executive order by Trump or any president to terminate birthright citizenship would likely be subjected to legal and judicial challenges.
On Dec. 8, immigration attorney Allen Orr Jr. wrote on X that a president cannot deport U.S. citizens because “U.S. citizenship cannot be revoked arbitrarily” under the 14th Amendment.
Orr added that in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a landmark case known as Afroyim v. Rusk “that the government cannot involuntarily strip a citizen of their citizenship, meaning a person can only lose their citizenship if they voluntarily relinquish it.”
Jean Reisz, a law professor and the co-director of the USC Immigration Clinic, told VERIFY it is unclear if Trump actually plans to forcefully deport U.S. citizens with undocumented parents, which she agrees he cannot legally do because it would be unlawful.
“It seems to me Trump is addressing a situation that often occurs in mixed-status families with young U.S. citizen or LPR [legal permanent resident] children, and/or spouses where a noncitizen family member is going to be deported and the family must decide whether they will go with the noncitizen to the country to where the noncitizen is being deported and start a life there, or stay in the U.S. and be separated from the noncitizen,” Reisz explained.
VERIFY reached out to the Trump transition team for clarification but did not hear back before publication.
Although deporting U.S. citizens is unconstitutional, it has happened illegally in the past, according to Mittelstadt and Maureen Sweeney, the director of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law.
“U.S. citizens have been deported, unlawfully, during prior instances of significant deportations, including during local ‘repatriation drives’ that took place around the U.S. during the Great Depression and during ‘Operation Wetback’ in the Eisenhower administration,” Mittelstadt said.
“These deportations were illegal then, as they would be now,” Sweeney noted.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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