While His Boss Embraces Overturning Birthright Citizenship, Joe Lombardo Refuses to Defend Nevadans

Nevada Current: When Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term restricting the right, Lombardo would not comment.

As Donald Trump and the NV GOP have been fighting to defy the Constitution and end birthright citizenship, new reporting shows that Joe Lombardo is silently cozying up with these extremists. After the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s unconstitutional executive order, the president is pushing the Court to reverse its decision while Lombardo remains his doormat.

Lombardo’s state party platform opposes birthright citizenship despite the fact that one in five Nevadans are immigrants and approximately 320,000 children in Nevada have at least one parent who is an immigrant. 

Nevada Current: Nevada Republican candidates largely mum on birthright citizenship

• A number of Nevada Republican candidates, including Gov. Joe Lombardo, are declining to say where they stand on President Donald Trump’s pivot to a legislative effort to impose restrictions on birthright citizenship, the long-standing right granted to babies born to immigrants in the United States.
  
• One in five Nevadans are immigrants, according to the American Immigration Council. An estimated 320,000 children in Nevada live with at least one immigrant parent. 
  
• In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s first-day-in-office executive order restricting birthright citizenship, prompting the president to declare hours later that Congress should be able to “easily” pass legislation eliminating the right. Congressional Republicans, however, are split.
  
• The Nevada Republican Party, of which Lombardo is the figurehead, opposes birthright citizenship in its 2024 platform, which remains in effect following the GOP’s failure to pass its 2026 platform at the state convention in May.
  
• Lombardo has long refused to state his position on birthright citizenship. When Trump signed an executive order on the first day of his second term restricting the right, Lombardo would not comment.
  
• Nevadans “deserve better than Lombardo’s subservience to Donald Trump – we need leaders who are unafraid to stand up for the rule of law and our most fundamental rights,” Ford said in a statement to the Current. Ford noted he “took action to protect Nevadans from Trump’s assault on birthright citizenship” as soon as it began, referring to a lawsuit he and attorneys general from other states filed on January 21, 2025.
  
• “Joe Lombardo’s failure to support birthright citizenship, the established law of our land, is yet more proof that he’s not fit to be our Governor,” Ford said.
  
• Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose ending birthright citizenship, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll from late June, including more than half of independents, 38% of Republicans, and 72% of Democrats.

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