President-elect Donald Trump has identified ending birthright citizenship as a top priority for his second administration, setting him up for a showdown over the controversial issue with Democrat lawmakers and the Supreme Court.
Congressional Republicans say that foreign nationals are taking advantage of the Constitution's 14th Amendment – which grants citizenship to everyone born in the United States – to gain a permanent foothold in the country, which the framers never envisioned.
They told The Hill that they believe Trump has the authority to take executive action and reinterpret the 14th Amendment's language to exclude the children of foreign-born individuals from receiving citizenship if they are born on U.S. soil.
"I've always thought that it was a bad law — to where anybody that was born here was an automatic citizen," Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told the outlet. "I'd be all for making that change."
Trump raised the idea of curtailing birthright citizenship recently during an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press."
"We have to end it," the president-elect said, dismissing the concept as "ridiculous."
According to The Hill, Republicans in the Senate think Trump will take action on the matter and that it will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority.
Adopted in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War, the 14th Amendment states that "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."
While the language has traditionally been interpreted as granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States, conservatives argue that it must be reinterpreted to exclude those who visit the U.S. in order to have their children gain automatic citizenship.
"The president and the Congress have the authority to interpret the Constitution just as the Supreme Court does," Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Hill. "It's just that the Supreme Court is the one that gets the last word."
It is within the president's purview to interpret the 14th Amendment narrowly to withhold Social Security numbers or passports from babies born to parents who are not U.S. citizens or green card holders, according to Krikorian.
"Then it will get to the Supreme Court and we'll see one way or another" how the issue is decided, he said.
He said the framers of the amendment and those who voted on it both in Congress and in state legislatures understood that "the whole point of the amendment" was "to prevent the Southern states after the [federal Union] army withdrew from stripping the newly freed slaves from their citizenship."
The framers never imagined that people would be traveling to give birth within the United States' borders for the sole purpose of gaining the benefits of U.S. citizenship, Krikorian said.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., is one of a growing contingent of Democrat lawmakers who fear that Trump will dismantle birthright citizenship when he returns to the White House.
"He keeps coming back to it," Kaine told NBC last week. "What was notable to me about [the] interview over the weekend is — it wasn't that he said what he said, because he's said it before — it's that he said it unprompted."
"He really got asked a question about mass deportation and building the wall but then he put the birthright citizenship in the middle of the answer," Kaine said.
"I think it would be foolish for us not to take it as a serious threat," he added.