President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday targeting birthright citizenship and so-called "birth tourism", reviving a fight he has waged for years. The executive action came barely five weeks after losing decisively at the Supreme Court on the issue. On June 30, in Trump v. Barbara, the court ruled 6–3 that the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause guarantees automatic citizenship to children born on American soil, irrespective of whether their parents are in the country temporarily or without authorisation. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that such children are citizens from the moment of birth.
Trump made no secret of his displeasure, calling the ruling "bad" and "very unfair", and vowed that his administration would tackle the issue "in a different way". Rather than attempting another sweeping ban of the kind the Court had just rejected, the new approach is narrower and more calculated, using existing executive and statutory powers to test the limits of the Court’s order.
There were two separate orders, each targeting a specific administrative issue rather than the constitutional question itself. The first, titled "Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship", instructs federal agencies to withhold citizenship documents in four particular circumstances. The order applies to children born to parents who belong to designated foreign terrorist organisations or who have been named specially designated global terrorists. It widens the long-standing diplomatic exception to cover consular staff, embassy employees and nationals of international organisations enjoying immunity. It denies citizenship where parents are found to have engaged in fraudulent activity, including commercial surrogacy arrangements, to secure it. And it excludes births in US territories where federal law does not explicitly confer citizenship, a category that in practice means almost exclusively American Samoa, since Puerto Rico and other major territories already have birthright citizenship codified by statute.
The second order, "Ending Birth Tourism", hands the president's authority under Section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act to the Departments of State and Homeland Security, directing them to deny visas, revoke travel authorisations, bar entry and deport foreign nationals judged to be travelling to the United States primarily to give birth there. It also takes aim at the operators who organise such trips, though it leaves narrow room for humanitarian exceptions or cases deemed to serve the national interest.
The real impact of these measures, however, looks limited. The scale of birth tourism itself is a matter of dispute. Trump says "hundreds of thousands" of babies are born this way each year, but independent estimates put the real figure at around 25,000. Government records identified only 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024. As against roughly 35 lakh births in the country annually, that amounts to under one per cent. Travelling to the United States under false pretences in order to secure citizenship for a child is, in any case, already illegal. And because federal statute already settles the matter in Puerto Rico and other major territories, the exclusion clause in the first order will have an effect only in American Samoa.
Civil rights groups and constitutional scholars say the orders are an attempt to work around the Supreme Court's ruling rather than to comply with it. The ACLU reiterated that birthright citizenship remains a constitutional guarantee and said the new orders would meet the same end as Trump's original attempt. The White House, however, said the restrictions were only narrow applications of the exceptions the Court itself had recognised, such as those covering diplomats or hostile foreign forces, and insisted that reliance on statutory authority like the Immigration and Nationality Act did not go against the Barbara ruling.
The president has the authority to stop foreign nationals from entering the US for the sole purpose of giving birth. However, once a child has been born on American soil, that authority runs out, as made clear by the Supreme Court. The latest executive orders are unlikely to change that.
