Trump Actually Wants To Make His Undocumented Immigrant 'Crisis' Even Worse

It all makes perfect sense — from a certain perspective.

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Donald Trump has spent the past decade of his political career treating undocumented immigrants as the great modern American crisis — but he’s still working hard to create more.

In January, on the first day of his second term in office, the president signed an executive order that states that only people born to at least one parent with citizenship status or legal permanent residency are legal citizens, an order that flies directly in the face of the 14th Amendment right to citizenship by birth. The federal government was promptly sued by different groups, including a coalition of states, and the proposed order has been subject to nationwide injunctions. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments Thursday in a case that could decide whether federal judges have the power to issue nationwide injunctions and, subsequently, whether the restrictions to citizenship could go into effect.

But the conservative justices seemed skeptical. It leaves open the possibility of allowing the order to go into effect, at least in some areas, and sets the stage for many of the approximately 150,000 babies born each year to undocumented immigrants on American soil to be denied citizenship — marking a dark new chapter in American history.

It makes sense that the Trump administration would continue its attacks on immigrants and immigrant rights: Every Trump campaign has been predicated on the notion that the country is under siege from hordes of immigrants and he’s the only one who can save us. And when he was elected for a second term, he tripled-down on his nativist instincts, vowing to conduct sweeping deportations of the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the U.S.