The Republicans’ plan to redefine US citizenship is Authoritarianism 101

President-elect Donald Trump made no secret during this year’s campaign of his expansive plan to deport all of America’s estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants. The issue has been among Trump’s most consistent hobby horses, and he vows to press on even as economists warn that his scheme would raise grocery prices for consumers and hobble American businesses.

In an interview with “Meet the Press” last weekend, Trump finally acknowledged the reality of what his “zero tolerance” immigration plan actually means. His grim promises not only include ending birthright citizenship and deputizing the military to serve as domestic police, but also a nightmare scenario where American citizens are deported from their home country alongside their undocumented family members.

The Constitution and longstanding laws stand in the way of Trump’s most absurd and extreme immigration fantasies. Or at least, they should. America’s legal institutions may not be as strong a bulwark against the MAGA movement’s xenophobia as institutionalists think, especially when so many Republicans are eager to give Trump anything he demands.

Democrats’ high-minded plan to wave the Constitution in Trump’s face isn’t going to win many arguments in a government that openly idolizes the muscular use of executive power. At any rate, some of the MAGA movement’s most loyal lawmakers are already hard at work undermining the clear meaning of clauses like the 14th Amendment’s grant of birthright citizenship to all people born within the country. In a series of factually challenged posts to X on Dec. 8, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) offered the opening salvo in the right’s war on citizenship rights.

Lee’s entire argument hinges on his audience not knowing how to read. He states that the 14th Amendment’s first section gives Congress the power to “define what it means to be born in the United States.” He argues that the Amendment's first sentence — “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” — empowers lawmakers to determine who is a citizen.

That reading is exactly backward in every possible way.

The 14th Amendment is meant to address the war that resulted from the government unilaterally deciding who qualified as a person (and, thus, a citizen). By stating plainly — read it yourself — that all persons born or naturalized into the United States are by right citizens, the 14th Amendment effectively prevents Congress from repeating the ruinous decision to disenfranchise and dehumanize Black Americans, or anyone else.

The power of authoritarianism rests in creating ambiguity in otherwise simple and collectively understood legal ideas, and then using that ambiguity to undermine the law’s original intent. Despite claiming to be a constitutional originalist, Lee has written in a sweeping and all-powerful role for Congress that simply does not exist in a plain reading of the 14th Amendment. To get to Lee’s position requires far more legal backflipping than simply reading the amendment’s actual words.

But Lee needs to make these big theoretical jumps because otherwise Republicans would need to amend the Constitution in order to remove birthright citizenship, something even they acknowledge is politically impossible. Easier, then, to just fudge the words so that instead of solidifying what it means to be a citizen, the 14th Amendment actually makes the idea even more ambiguous.

It’s worth noting that at no point in the actual debates over the 14th Amendment did the lawmakers involved in writing it ever humor an idea even close to Lee’s broad reading of federal power. How convenient that Lee’s hazy reading allows Republicans to do exactly what they want to do without the necessary approval of two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate!

When bogus legal interpretation fails, Republicans have another, more direct tool in their belt: good old-fashioned fear mongering. On “Meet the Press,” Trump threw out the scary claim that America stands alone as the only nation in the world that allows birthright citizenship. In fact, 65 countries have enacted some form of birthright citizenship, with 33 nations offering the same unrestricted citizenship by birth we have in America. But that doesn’t sound nearly as scary.

Redefining citizenship is a key priority of Trump’s second administration. It’s also one of the first things any authoritarian movement does upon seizing power. Defining who counts as a “real” citizen is a powerful tool for autocrats to reshape electorates and exclude huge swaths of people they’d rather not represent.

Trump and Republicans are giving Americans ample evidence that they are serious about reshaping what it means to be a U.S. citizen, regardless of what federal law, the Constitution or the courts have to say about it.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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