FACT CHECK: 14th Amendment On Citizenship Cannot Be Overwritten By Executive Order

President Trump says he can end birthright citizenship with an executive order. But most legal scholars — and even leaders of the president's own party — are skeptical.

In an interview with Axios, published Tuesday, the president said he wants to end the automatic right to citizenship for babies born in the U.S. to noncitizens.

"You can definitely do it with an act of Congress," Trump said in the Axios interview. "But now they're saying I can do it just with an executive order."

The 14th Amendment holds that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States." Most legal scholars take that as an explicit protection of birthright citizenship — and think it will take much more than an executive order to change that.

"Trump may have a lawyer who is telling him the 14th Amendment means something else, but that lawyer is like a unicorn," said Rebecca Hamlin, a professor of legal studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Trump's proposal seems to rely on the work of a small but vocal group of conservative legal scholars who argue the 14th Amendment has long been misread. In particular, they argue, five key words — "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" — have been misread and that the authors of the 14th Amendment did not intend to give citizenship to the children of temporary visitors and other noncitizens.