President Donald Trump went back to the question of who is born American on Thursday, signing two executive orders at the Resolute Desk that would withhold automatic citizenship from a handful of narrowly drawn groups of U.S.-born children. The signing came five weeks and two days after the Supreme Court gutted his first, far broader attempt. Reuters reported the White House characterized the pair as widening who falls outside birthright citizenship while shutting down the commercial "birth tourism" trade.
The president made no attempt to disguise his annoyance with the justices, telling reporters the amendment had been written for the aftermath of the Civil War: "This was for the babies of slaves." He also described June's ruling as a near-run thing. It wasn't. Six justices ruled against him.
A narrower target than January 2025
The legal design here is nothing like the inauguration-day order. That one reached for the children of unauthorized immigrants and temporary visa holders as a class. This package, as reported by Axios, instead grabs the few exceptions to the Citizenship Clause that courts have always acknowledged — the offspring of diplomats and of hostile occupying forces — and tries to widen them from the inside.
Administration lawyers read the June decision as having left those carve-outs untouched, and therefore available. White House staff secretary Will Scharf told reporters the orders rest on "legally validated means" that don't collide with the ruling. Critics reply that exceptions recognized precisely because they are exceptional cannot be stretched on demand.
What the two orders reach
According to Axios, which obtained the details ahead of the signing, the orders apply only to future births and cover four categories.
Foreign diplomatic staff. Children born to noncitizen employees serving another government on U.S. soil. Ambassadors' families were never covered by the Fourteenth Amendment; this pushes the line down the org chart. CBS News described the reach as extending to children of foreign nationals who lobby for foreign governments.
"Alien enemies." Children of people the government so designates, including members of federally declared terrorist organizations. Deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told reporters the ineligible would take in those judged "alien enemies, foreign terrorists and foreign agents", Bloomberg reported.
Children born in U.S. territories — but only if Congress first rewrites the governing statutes.
Children of birth-tourism mothers, meaning women who enter under false pretenses for the single purpose of delivering on American soil. Surrogacy arrangements used toward the same end are also targeted.
The second order is machinery rather than definition: it directs the secretary of state and the DHS secretary to produce rules and guidance aimed at breaking up the industry at home and abroad.
The fraud trapdoor
The birth-tourism provision is the inventive one. Rather than argue such babies sit outside U.S. jurisdiction, the administration recasts the mother's conduct as fraud. Washington can already strip naturalized citizenship obtained through deception; officials say that principle should carry over when a woman lies about her purpose at the visa window or the port of entry.
Whether it survives a federal judge is another matter. A Fourteenth Amendment claim belongs to the child. Nothing in the June opinion suggests a parent's deceit can be charged against a newborn.
Immigration scholars have argued the government already has what it needs. Amanda Frost, who teaches immigration law at the University of Virginia, told PolitiFact in March: "If birth tourism is a problem, the answer is to enforce that regulation." She meant a 2020 State Department rule from Trump's first term, still on the books, that bars B-2 visitor visas sought chiefly to win a baby citizenship. Federal regulation also lets border officers turn away a pregnant traveler they judge to be coming to give birth.
The Puerto Rico clause that Congress has to switch on
The territories piece is the sleeper — and the most conditional. Citizenship in Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the Northern Marianas comes from congressional statute, not the Constitution, a split rooted in the century-old Insular Cases. American Samoa, the fifth inhabited territory, never received statutory citizenship at all. The order does nothing unless lawmakers move first.
Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) introduced that legislation in July. H.R. 9724, the End Birthright Citizenship for Territories Act, would apply to babies born on or after Jan. 1, 2027, and it preserves citizenship for children with a U.S.-citizen or green-card parent. Axios reported it isn't expected to pass.
Its actual reach is disputed even among people who grant its premise. Neil Weare of Right to Democracy has warned that the statutory amendments themselves carry no limiting text tying them to birth tourism, and could therefore deny citizenship to anyone born in a territory going forward — a reading walked through in detail by Puerto Rico Report. Puerto Rican legal scholar Efrén Rivera Ramos told Democracy Now! the bill would manufacture "a subclass of people who can be discriminated against."
The numbers are smaller than the rhetoric
No federal agency counts birth tourism directly. The closest official proxy: the CDC logged roughly 9,600 births in 2024 to mothers listing an address outside the country, against about 3.7 million U.S. births — a rate under three-tenths of one percent.
Bigger estimates circulate. The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors lower immigration, has been cited by the Migration Policy Institute as putting the yearly figure at 22,000 to 26,000, a range MPI calls expansive and contested. Reuters, meanwhile, described the same think tank's work as covering 20,000 to 25,000 mothers across a 2016–17 span.
For scale, MPI calculated the original 2025 order would have denied citizenship to about 255,000 babies a year, and could enlarge the unauthorized population by as much as 2.7 million by 2045.
What the Court actually held
In Trump v. Barbara, decided June 30, the judgment ran 6–3 against Executive Order 14160. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion of the Court, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett and Jackson. Justice Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote through a separate opinion concurring in the judgment and dissenting in part. Justice Thomas dissented, joined by Justice Gorsuch; Gorsuch and Justice Alito also filed separate dissents.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer had leaned hard on birth tourism at the April 1 argument, contending that "subject to the jurisdiction" hinges on domicile rather than geography. Roberts was unmoved, replying: "It's a new world. It's the same Constitution."
The orders land on top of a campaign that has been building for months. The Justice Department has told U.S. attorneys to make birth-tourism cases a priority, SCOTUSblog noted this week, citing Bloomberg Law. House Oversight has been demanding documents from a Miami operator since May.
What happens next
Two caveats. First, CBS reported the White House had not released the text of either order at signing time, leaving operative language, effective dates and enforcement mechanics unverified. Second, several early wire and radio summaries flattened the package into "orders covering territory-born children"; Axios's account makes the congressional precondition explicit, and this piece follows the narrower version.
Litigation looks close to certain. The coalition that won in June — the ACLU with its New Hampshire, Maine and Massachusetts affiliates, the Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus and Democracy Defenders Fund — has not announced a new challenge. Asked Thursday whether the orders would clear constitutional review, Trump said he expected them to.
