News - Middle East: Former hawkish US president Donald Trump has pledged to deny children of illegal immigrants in the US the constitutional right to automatic citizenship by birth if he wins the presidential race in 2024.

Trump -- so far, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination -- declared on Tuesday in a campaign video posted on Twitter that he would issue an executive order directing federal agencies to stop what he described as birthright citizenship.
Such an action by Trump will definitely face a legal challenge, since it contradicts how a 19th-century amendment to the US Constitution has long been interpreted.
The right to citizenship stems from the 14th Amendment to the Constitution that purportedly ended the slavery of blacks in the southern US states and overturned a Supreme Court ruling that barred slaves and free Africans from obtaining US citizenship.
The amendment granted citizenship to all persons "born or naturalized in the United States," including those formerly enslaved, and has been interpreted to mean whether or not the parents were in the country lawfully.
Long after the amendment was ratified in 1868, however, the brutal practice of slavery and widespread discrimination and suppression against the African American population continued across the US. Even after the so-called civil rights movement in the 1960s -- led by black leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X,