WASHINGTON — President Trump signed two executive orders Thursday to narrow birthright citizenship, six weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that his first attempt to do so violated the 14th Amendment.
The orders reopen a fight the White House has already lost once, testing whether Trump can achieve through immigration authority what the court told him he cannot achieve by executive fiat. The first targets commercial "birth tourism" by denying entry to individuals engaged in the practice. The second lists categories of newborns the administration says are ineligible for birthright citizenship documents, drawing an immediate constitutional challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union.
What the orders do
The second order names four categories deemed ineligible for citizenship documents: children whose mothers engaged in commercial transactions to give birth in the United States, children of members of foreign terrorist groups, children of foreign government employees, and children born in U.S. territories "where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute." The order excludes any child with at least one U.S. citizen parent. Citizenship in Puerto Rico and other populated territories is codified by federal statute, the BBC noted, and would not be disturbed.
Miller's argument
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, standing beside Trump in the Oval Office, framed the birth tourism order as an exercise of the president's authority under the Immigration and Nationality Act to limit who enters the country. Miller said: "The idea that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor, saying they want to go to Disneyland or they want to go visit a monument or go to a national park, but the real reason they're here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country, and then have a U.S. citizen child." The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates 22,000 to 26,000 babies are born through birth tourism in the U.S. each year, and cited government data showing 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.
Trump on the court
Trump used the signing ceremony to rebuke the justices who blocked the first order. "We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright, it was close," he said. He restated his view that the 14th Amendment was intended narrowly. "This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves," Trump said. Asked whether the new orders would survive constitutional review, he replied, "I think it will."
The court record
The exchange Trump is trying to relitigate is on the record. During oral argument in the earlier case, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued that the growth of commercial birth tourism should inform the citizenship question, telling the justices, "We're in a new world now … where 8 billion people are one plane ride away from having a child who is a U.S. citizen." Chief Justice John Roberts cut in: "You do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us." When Sauer conceded the point, Roberts replied, "Well, it's a new world. It's the same Constitution."
Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said the new orders would meet the same fate as the first: "The Supreme Court already decided this issue: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution. Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one." Gabriel Chin, a professor at the University of California, Davis School of Law, told the BBC that the birth-tourism entry restriction may survive because the president has broad authority over who is admitted to the country, but that once a child is born on U.S. soil the president has no power to strip that citizenship. Chin called birth tourism an unusual phenomenon and a drop in the bucket against the millions of U.S. births each year.
Civil rights groups said Thursday they intend to file suit within days, setting up another round of injunctions likely to reach the Supreme Court well before the 2026 midterms.