Trump signs new orders targeting birthright citizenship

Orders come after supreme court rejected president’s first bid to restrict guarantee enshrined in US constitution

Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday to restrict eligibility for birthright citizenship and ban “birth tourism”, just over a month after the US supreme court rejected his first attempt to curtail the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the constitution.

“We had a very unfortunate decision in the supreme court concerning birthright,” Trump said in the Oval Office. “It was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair.”

The orders signed on Thursday seek to expand the definitions ​of children the White House deems ineligible ⁠for birthright ​citizenship and also ​seek to ban “birth ​tourism”, which the president claimed on Thursday is practiced by “hundreds of thousands” of people. They are expected to be challenged in court.

“They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” Trump told reporters. “People are building businesses around it. That’s not the way it’s supposed ‌to work. It’s a disgrace. They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”

According to the Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate “puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024”.

That is less than 1% of all the babies born in the United States each year.

Trump has long sought to dismantle the principle of birthright citizenship, making it a top priority of his second-term immigration crackdown, but has thus far been unsuccessful.

On 30 June, his effort to deny automatic citizenship to children born to parents in the United States illegally or on temporary visas suffered a setback when the supreme court upheld the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, affirming that nearly all people born on US soil are American citizens.

In an apparent attempt to circumvent that ruling, the president’s first order seeks to expand the definition of who would not qualify for automatic US citizenship.

Historical exceptions to the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment have included children born in the US to foreign sovereigns and diplomats; children of occupying foreign forces; children born on foreign ships; and children of Native Americans.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, said the order aims to deny birthright citizenship to others, including children of members of “foreign terrorist organizations” as well as “large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments”, though it is unclear who would fall into the latter category.

The move “ensures that large numbers of people who [would] wrongly be getting birthright citizenship will no longer be eligible for those benefits”, Miller said.

The order also seeks to expand the exception of children born to foreign ambassadors to include more foreign government employees. It also refers to people born in “a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute” as ineligible. At the moment, that only includes American Samoa.

It also aimed to restrict birthright citizenship to anyone whose parents “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship”.

Trump’s second order seeks to increase restrictions on visitors to the US who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country by targeting “birth tourism operators [who] use deceptive advertisements and inducements to entice foreign nationals to travel to the United States for the purpose of giving birth on American soil”.

The order goes on to say that “participants in birth tourism schemes abuse [temporary non-immigrant visa categories] to establish a permanent foothold in the United States by securing the advantage of citizenship for their children and then potentially for themselves”.

Travelling to the United States under the guise of tourism while actually intending to give birth so the child automatically obtains citizenship constitutes visa fraud and is already illegal, and it is unclear exactly how Trump’s new orders will build on what is already law.