President Donald Trump this week renewed his efforts targeting birthright citizenship after the Supreme Court delivered a crippling blow to his immigration reform agenda.
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Trump on Thursday signed executive orders aimed at restricting birthright citizenship and targeting the practice of traveling to the U.S. with the intent to give birth to a child who would then be a citizen.
“President Trump has delivered on his promise to fix the immigration system, prioritize American citizens and protect U.S. citizenship,” a White House fact sheet on the orders stated.
Trump previously tried to put an end to birthright citizenship through an executive order that was struck down by the Supreme Court in June.
A divided high court that children born in the U.S. to parents who are in the country unlawfully or are temporarily present are citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause.
The 14th Amendment states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”
But the decision seems to have only reignited Trump’s efforts at immigration reform.
What Do Trump’s Executive Orders Do?
The first executive order, titled “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” identifies certain categories of children of aliens who are not entitled to birthright citizenship. These groups include children born to members of foreign terrorist groups, as well as an expanded category of employees working for foreign governments whose U.S.-born children are not eligible for automatic citizenship.
“The privilege of United States citizenship remains a priceless and profound gift,” the executive order states.
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The new action appears to be a narrower and more tailored approach than Trump’s first executive order targeting birthright citizenship.
The second order directs federal officials to “halt the practice of birth tourism.”
“Citizenship is not a commodity to be acquired through calculated exploitation and evasion of the immigration laws, such as by entering the United States on a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth within the nation’s borders,” the executive order states.
The moves are likely to face legal challenges.
What Is ‘Birth Tourism’?
Trump’s executive order defines the term as a foreign national traveling to the U.S. with a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil.
The federal government does not have exact data on the phenomenon, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to foreign residents in 2024.
Trump, however, has stated much larger numbers without the support of data, and the issue has become a frequent talking point of Republicans.
In 2023, he proposed an executive order to “end their unfair practice known as birth tourism where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the planet squat in hotels for their last few weeks of pregnancy to illegitimately and illegally obtain U.S. citizenship for the child, often to later exploit chain migration to jump the line and get green cards for themselves and their family members.”
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