Setting the agenda: Trump eyes ending birthright citizenship and pardoning Jan. 6 rioters for day one
Published in News & Features
In his first network news appearance since his nearly unprecedented political comeback and election victory, President-elect Donald Trump said he’s planning to undo part of the U.S. constitution via executive action and that he hopes to see several sitting and former members of Congress locked up.
Trump, during a pre-recorded interview with NBC aired Sunday, said his next administration will first take aim at undocumented people with criminal records, before moving on to “others,” but that even U.S. citizens born to unlawfully present parents are at risk of getting swept up in his plans to attempt the largest mass deportation effort in U.S. history.
“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.
“We’re starting with the criminals — we’ve got to do it — and then we’re starting with others and we’re going to see how it goes,” he said.
Trump’s plan — as described — would run up against the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says plainly 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.”
Trump says he’s got a day-one proposal to get around that.
“We’re going to have to get it changed. We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it. We’re the only country that has it,” he said.
Trump said he will change that part of the Constitution “if we can, through executive action.”
“We have to end it. It’s ridiculous. Do you know we’re the only country in the world that has it? Do you know that? There’s not one other country,” he said.
The United States is joined by most nations in North and South America in guaranteeing citizenship to those born within their borders, including Canada and Mexico.
Trump said he will also use his first day back in the White House to look at pardons for those convicted of crimes in relation to the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Meanwhile, according to the incoming Commander-in-Chief, it’s the members of Congress who investigated the attack who should be locked up.
“Honestly, they should go to jail for what they did,” he said, without clarifying what they had done.
Trump said that isn’t his intention to direct his Attorney General or FBI Director to undertake an investigation into the investigators, but that “I think that they’ll have to look at that.”
Despite raising the issue, though, Trump said he’ll be too focused on immigration enforcement and boosting U.S. energy production to involve himself with the arrest of former U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney or committee Chairman Bennie Thompson.
“I’m not interested. I have the absolute right. I’m the chief law enforcement officer, you do know that? I’m the president. But I’m not interested in that. You know what I’m interested in? Drilling, and getting prices down, and stopping people from pouring into our border that come from prisons and mental institutions,” he said.
The 45th and soon-to-be 47th President ended his first post-election network interview with assurances for those who did not vote for him, saying he plans to “treat them just the same as I treat MAGA. We’re going to treat everybody good.”
“What I say to them is I love you,” Trump said.
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