Donald Trump Targeting People 'Who Don't Look Like Him' With Birthright Citizenship Threat, Democrat Says

President Donald Trump was targeting people "who don't look like him" in his threat to birthright citizenship but was unwilling to fend off mass violence from legal gun owners, according to a top House Democrat on Tuesday morning.

Representative Eric Swalwell of California attacked the president over his threat to end the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to a child born in the United States.

Swalwell specifically compared the president's support of Second Amendment rights to those of defending Americans to that of immigrants allegedly posing a national security threat.

"Put this in perspective. @realDonaldTrump is willing to delete a passage from the Constitution to target people who don't look like him. BUT he's unwilling to do anything to protect you from violence, arguing that it would conflict with the Second Amendment in same Constitution," Salwell said.

Swalwell was responding to a leaked portion of Trump's interview with Axios on HBO, in which the president claimed he had the ability to circumvent Congress and rescind the amendment.

"It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don't," Trump said.

The president was challenged about his ability to take such a measure and stated: "You can definitely do it with an Act of Congress. But now they're saying I can do it just with an executive order."

Trump added, incorrectly: "We're the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen of the United States ... with all of those benefits."

Should Trump move forward with the executive order, it would serve as his latest aggressive attempt to alter the country's immigration laws. Trump campaigned on building a massive wall along the country's shared border with Mexico but had yet to receive such funds from Congress.

Trump has frequently accused Democrats of stopping any attempts to revamp the country's immigration laws. The president initially called for denying so-called Dreamers a path to attaining citizenship but later suggested he was open to the idea as long as his border wall received funding.

The president had long been viewed as a hardliner against illegal immigration, but his attempts to break down the system have faced fierce backlash. Trump's claim followed threats against a caravan of migrants coming from Central America, prior to next week's midterm elections, who hoped to enter the country with claims of asylum.