'Family separation on steroids': Expert lays into Trump plan to target newborn babies

President Donald Trump's administration has drawn up a draft of guidelines to block non-U.S. citizens from having children on U.S. soil and becoming citizens.

The Constitution details "birthright citizenship" in the 14th Amendment, saying that anybody born on American soil belongs to the nation. The Trump administration has tried to block that with an executive order.

Speaking to MSNBC, Slate legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern said the guidelines are a backdoor effort to reinstate the family separation policy from the early days of the first Trump administration. In that case, the government took children from their parents when they came into the U.S. In some instances, the children were given to a host family, while others were thrown in a "detention center."

"For months, federal courts have prevented the U.S. government from even beginning to plan the implementation of this executive order, finding that it violated the 14th Amendment," said Stern, noting that the Supreme Court then stepped in to allow it.

"What we see is that this administration doesn't plan to give any kind of grace period to the children of undocumented immigrants. It will render them noncitizens and deportable from the moment of birth," clarified Stern.

"The administration has also repealed a 14-year-old rule that barred ICE from entering and committing enforcement actions in and around hospitals. So, the government now has a setup where it can send ICE agents into maternity wards, as you said, to monitor births to demand papers from new mothers and fathers, and to potentially take away and deport their children, their infants, from the moment they're born. If the parents can't prove citizenship to their satisfaction."

Under the new memo, there are about a dozen new classifications of people who will have their U.S. citizenship taken away.

"In fact, the trump administration has already started to quietly reintroduce family separation by relaxing restrictions that had been imposed over the last few years to prevent it from happening," Stern noted. "The government seems ready to take away infants from their parents if they deem it necessary to effectuate immigration laws. And if this order takes effect, that baby would be deportable upon birth."

Worse, he said, those infants could be taken, denied citizenship, and under Supreme Court rulings, they could be deported to a third-party country in which they or their parents haven't set foot.

"This would be like family separation in the first administration on steroids, with a hugely disproportionate impact on the youngest and most vulnerable among us," he characterized.

See the clip below or at the link here.

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