Immigrants face tough times, even after Trump’s birthright citizenship order

President Donald Trump stands alongside local Muslim leaders during a campaign rally in October 2024 in Michigan.

President Donald Trump’s executive order severely restricting birthright citizenship in the U.S. is getting battered in the courts, with four federal judges already blocking its implementation until a slew of legal challenges can be sorted out. Yet even this twilight period before the order’s legality is decided is having a chilling effect on immigrant communities in California and elsewhere.

Signed by Trump on the first day of his second term in office, the order would deny citizenship to children born in the U.S. to mothers who are in the country on temporary visas or are undocumented, and whose fathers are neither citizens nor lawful residents. The order would ostensibly prevent women from traveling to the U.S. simply to give birth to babies who will automatically become American citizens.

Researchers who’ve long studied this aspect of the government’s shifting immigration policies, however, know the dark road being traveled, as Capital & Main has previously reported.

The chilling effect is that of creating fear from uncertainty, said Arturo Bustamante, the director of faculty research at UCLA’s Latino Policy & Politics Institute and co-author of a recent policy brief on the topic. Immigrants may not understand that Trump’s order would not be applied retroactively, or they may simply read the order as a threat to their ability to build a life for their families in this country.

That leads to a series of calculations from the immigrant’s point of view that, in order for them to prepare for this risk, they need to act differently, the researcher said.

Some families, say Bustamante and other experts, will react by not going to the doctor, even when parents or kids get sick. They will stop using such basic safety net services as the food-access program CalFresh. Some may not enroll their children in school in an attempt to become less visible and, they hope, less likely to suffer consequences from a government action that isn’t even in place.

Immediate court challenges to the executive order pointed out that it violates the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment, which confers citizenship within the precise categories Trump singled out. Experts like Bustamante, though, say they know what’s already happening, and what will continue to happen, within frightened immigrant communities.

During Trump’s first term, his administration announced a wholesale change to the country’s public charge policies. Those rules are used by federal officials to deny a person entry to the U.S. or adjustment to lawful permanent resident status (a green card) if they predict that the applicant will ultimately become dependent on ongoing public assistance.

Trump’s administration announced in 2018 that it would empower officials to consider the applicant’s use of noncash public assistance programs, like the low-income health program Medicaid or SNAP (food stamps), in making decisions on their status. Those categories, which include the Children’s Health Insurance Program, had previously been off-limits in making such determinations.

That policy change didn’t actually take effect until 2020. But in those two years in between, when it wasn’t even on the books yet, researchers found that even U.S.-born children (who were citizens) were disenrolled from Medicaid, many others who were eligible to enroll did not. And one explanation was that the public charge rule was in the public discourse. It creates fear and changes the behavior of immigrants in a much more conservative direction.

In the end, Trump’s public charge changes lasted only about 20 months before being unwound by the Biden administration, which noted that citizen children of many immigrant families weren’t using Medicaid, although they were fully eligible to do so. Yet by 2023, close to 12% of adults in immigrant families still said they avoided safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP because they feared using them would jeopardize their green card status, according to the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

The details and timing of the policy mattered less to immigrants, Bustamante said, than the clear threat implied by the enacting of the policy itself.

In addition to the human cost of families avoiding public assistance out of fear, there are practical considerations, especially in California. Though an exact count is elusive, and most researchers believe the actual number is much higher, the state is home to at least 1.8 million undocumented immigrants, and undocumented workers are estimated to comprise about 6% of the workforce.

A 2024 analysis by economists at California Lutheran University found that undocumented workers are the source of more than half a trillion dollars of products in the state. Yet nearly 40% of undocumented immigrants in California have no health insurance, as opposed to 8% of the state’s population overall, according to Jamshid Damooei, executive director of Cal Lutheran’s Center for Economics of Social Issues.

Access to health care is a human right, Damooei said. A large proportion of undocumented immigrants are denied such rights.

Among the international members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S., Mexico, South Korea and Turkey are the only nations that do not recognize universal health care as a basic human right.

The majority of Americans surveyed say that children born in the U.S. should automatically become citizens, and a recent Pew Center poll found that 56% disapprove of Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order. Under Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, California has expanded its Medi-Cal program (the state’s version of Medicaid) to include all residents who qualify, regardless of immigration status.

But Trump’s threat to birthright citizenship will almost surely lead to more Californians shunning that basic health care, for fear that their own immigrant information will be recorded and perhaps shared and their children’s citizen status subsequently threatened.

Of course, that’s the point, Bustamante said. It happened before, with the public charge rule and even now, the fear of that rule is still present in immigrant communities, even though it’s been changed. This administration has not changed it back yet, but I would anticipate it will be on the agenda in the future. And that is the same idea behind making this announcement on birthright citizenship to stoke fear.

Capital & Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the most pressing economic, environmental and social issues of our time, including economic inequality, climate change, health care, threats to democracy, hate and extremism and immigration.