Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) unveiled legislation on Wednesday that would bar children of illegal aliens, foreign terrorists, and foreign spies from becoming citizens through birthright citizenship, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
“Criminals and terrorists have no right to take advantage of our citizenship laws for their own gain. This bill will protect United States citizenship and ensure it cannot be given under false pretenses,” Cotton said in an exclusive statement to Breitbart News.
Cotton has unveiled the Constitutional Citizenship Clarification Act, a bill that aims to enshrine in statute the “ambassadors and invaders” exceptions to birthright citizenship.
Essentially, enacting Cotton’s legislation would bar children of illegal aliens, foreign terrorists, and foreign spies from being entitled to birthright citizenship by amending Section 301 of the Immigration and Nationality Act to:
- Clarify that a “person born in the United States shall not be considered subject to jurisdiction of the United States in the person of alien parents who are —
- unlawfully present in the United States (illegal aliens)
- present in the United States for diplomatic purposes
- engaged in a hostile occupation of, or a hostile operation in, the United States
“Biden has also ordered ICE not to enforce immigration laws against pregnant “individuals,” allowing an illegal immigrant to stay in the United States until her child is born and granted birthright citizenship.
In fiscal year 2024 alone, Biden is on track to have overseen more than 10 million migrant encounters at the U.S. borders. Many illegal aliens, despite of the best work of the Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), have entered the United States, as Cotton mentions in a release viewed by Breitbart News, a “disproportionate percentage of illegal immigrants are of child-bearing age, and the Biden administration has placed a high priority on providing legal protections and government benefits for young adult illegals.”
Now, Biden on Tuesday issued an executive order that aims to curb the migrant crisis at the southern border; however, it really permits 2,500 migrant encounters at the border per day.
“The only acceptable number of illegal immigrants crossing our border at any period is zero. And conveniently, Joe Biden has just discovered the error of his ways and new powers five months before an election,” Cotton said during an interview on Tuesday:
Cotton continued:
He [Biden] should have never invited these people to come to our country in the first place. The only proper way to come to America is through legal immigration pathways, not showing up at our border with some bogus claim of asylum or some sob story and expecting to get into the country. That’s what we had under Donald Trump: a secure border where people could only get here through legal pathways. But ever since Joe Biden took office, it has been an open border that has created chaos, and unleashed crime and drugs all across America’s cities and our states.
The issue of birthright citizenship has been a thorny issue for those who want to clamp down on illegal immigration.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) found in a 2018 study that there are roughly 300,000 births per year to illegal aliens, which is larger than the total number of births in any state other than California and Texas.
Former President Donald Trump last year promised that would he would sign an executive order on day one of his second term effectively ending birthright citizenship for illegal aliens and so-called “birth tourism.”
“As part of my plan to secure the border, on day one of my new term in office I will sign an executive order making clear to federal agencies that under the correct interpretation of the law going forward the future children of illegal aliens will not receive automatic U.S. citizenship,” Trump said.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
