President Trump has pledged, yet again, to end more than 150 years of legal precedent and halt the practice of giving individuals born on American soil the automatic right to U.S. citizenship.

In a campaign video released Tuesday, the former president now running for re-election says he has the power — via executive order — to reverse the 14th Amendment and deprive the children of parents in the country illegally the right to citizenship.

“The United States is among the only countries in the world that says that even if neither parent is a citizen nor even lawfully in the country, their future children are automatic citizens, the moment the parents trespass onto our soil,” Mr Trump said in a video released by his campaign. “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 US citizenship.”

If the pledge sounds familiar, that’s because Mr. Trump promised the same thing before the 2016 election that propelled him into office the first time. “The birthright citizenship, the anchor baby, birthright citizenship, it’s over, not going to happen,” he said during a stump speech at Orlando, Florida, in November 2015.

Once in office, he went quiet on the issue during the first two years when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress and the White House, reviving it only in the days leading up to the 2018 midterms, a blue-wave election that cost the GOP the House. He also talked about ending the practice in 2019, and again during his unsuccessful bid for re-election in 2020.

What’s different now compared to the previous years? Not much. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1868, states unequivocally: “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.” Subsequent rulings from federal courts have upheld the law, and as a consequence anyone born on U.S. soil — regardless of their parents’ status — is considered an American citizen. 

While there are few legal scholars who agree with the notion that a president can overturn a constitutional amendment with the stroke of a pen, some immigration hardliners in Mr. Trump’s orbit have argued that the “subject to the jurisdiction” language in the amendment means that people who are in the country illegally are not subject to the country’s jurisdiction and therefore do not enjoy the rights granted by the amendment.

The 14th Amendment was passed in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott vs. Sandford case in 1857, which held that no Black American could ever be a citizen of the United States. Writing in the Washington Post in the summer of 2018, a former national security official in the Trump administration, Michael Anton, argued that the amendment has been misinterpreted for decades and that “birthright citizenship was a mistake whose time has gone.

“For decades, U.S. officials — led by immigration enthusiasts in and out of government — have acted as though ‘subject to the jurisdiction’ simply means ‘subject to American law,’” Mr. Anton wrote. “The framers of the 14th Amendment added the jurisdiction clause precisely to distinguish between people to whom the United States owes citizenship and those to whom it does not. Freed slaves definitely qualified. The children of immigrants who came here illegally clearly don’t.”

The Supreme Court has already ruled that the children of lawful immigrants automatically have citizenship, but it has yet to weigh in on the questions raised by Mr. Trump’s pledge. Should Mr. Trump actually carry through on his threat during a second term, his executive order would almost certainly be challenged and a re-interpretation of the 14th Amendment could come before a Supreme Court decidedly more conservative than it was only a decade ago.