Trump Signs New Orders Restricting Birthright Citizenship

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed two new executive orders on Thursday aimed at restricting birthright citizenship and curbing “birth tourism,” just five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his original executive order on the issue. The new directives represent the administration’s continued push to reshape U.S. immigration policy through executive action.

The first order, “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” seeks to expand the categories of children ineligible for automatic U.S. citizenship. It targets children of members of designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations, foreign government employees, parents who engaged in “fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship,” and persons born in U.S. territories where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute. The second order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” directs the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security to prevent entry into the U.S. of foreign nationals coming specifically to give birth, revoke visas of those who do, and take action against “birth tourism operators.”

According to AP News, Trump said he believed his latest actions would be constitutional, despite the Supreme Court’s June ruling against his previous attempt.

A Narrower Approach After a Major Setback

The new orders come after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on June 30 in Trump v. Barbara that Trump’s original executive order restricting birthright citizenship was unconstitutional. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the majority opinion, holding that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States and entitled to citizenship at birth under the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.

Trump’s original executive order, signed on January 20, 2025 — his first day in office in his second term — was immediately challenged in court, blocked by lower courts, and never took effect. The new orders represent a more targeted approach, attempting to expand the narrow historical exceptions to the 14th Amendment rather than seeking to end birthright citizenship broadly.

“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way,” Trump said, as reported by The Guardian.

The Birth Tourism Crackdown

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and chief architect of Trump’s anti-immigration agenda, defended the second order at the signing ceremony. “Birth tourism is by definition a fraud on the American system, on the American taxpayer,” Miller said, according to the New York Post. He said the order targets those “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.”

White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf claimed that “criminal rings are setting up a system whereby tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people can come to this country in an organized fashion and give birth here purely for the sake of obtaining birthright citizenship.”

However, the scale of the practice appears far smaller than the administration suggests. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on U.S. soil, though government data shows just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024 — less than 1% of all babies born in the United States each year. Trump claimed “hundreds of thousands” of people undertake this practice, without providing evidence.

Legal Experts Expect Another Defeat

The ACLU has already predicted that Trump’s second attempt will be rejected. “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,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, as reported by Al Jazeera.

Constitutional law expert Kimberly Wehle told Al Jazeera that the orders are likely to be deemed unconstitutional, speculating that Trump may be seeking to appeal to his far-right base at a time when his poll numbers are slumping. “It looks like what Donald Trump is setting up is a clash between himself and the authority of the United States Supreme Court,” Wehle said. “Lots of things aren’t looking up for Donald Trump, so he’s trying to make political hay out of something that, frankly, is resolved.”

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.” The Supreme Court has historically interpreted this broadly, most notably in the 1898 case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which confirmed that children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents are American citizens.

The full text of both executive orders is available on the White House website.

What to Watch For

The new executive orders are expected to face immediate legal challenges, with the ACLU and other advocacy groups likely to file suit. Key questions include how the administration will determine which pregnant women are coming as tourists versus those intending to give birth, and whether the courts will allow the administration to narrow the exceptions to birthright citizenship through executive action.

Trump’s continued push on this issue, despite the Supreme Court’s clear ruling, suggests birthright citizenship will remain a central battleground in his second-term immigration agenda. As France24 noted, the president’s efforts are part of a wider campaign to limit immigration that includes expelling millions of undocumented migrants and removing deportation protections from nationals of more than a dozen countries.

For now, the legal and political fight over who gets to be an American — and how — appears far from settled.