Six weeks after the Supreme Court rejected his first attempt to narrow birthright citizenship, President Trump tried again. On August 6, he signed two new executive orders from the Oval Office, and within days the fallout was measurable: over 600 canceled visas, a fresh ACLU court filing, and a fight over what, exactly, the Justice Department has said about it.
A Loss at the Supreme Court, Then a Second Try
The new orders trace back to Trump's first day in office in January 2025, when he signed an order stripping automatic citizenship from children born in the U.S. to parents without permanent legal status. Courts blocked it almost immediately, and the fight climbed all the way to the Supreme Court. On June 30, 2026, the justices ruled 6–3 in Trump v. Barbara, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority, that the 14th Amendment's citizenship guarantee covers nearly every child born on U.S. soil regardless of a parent's immigration status.
Rather than abandon the effort, the administration went looking for a narrower opening. The June ruling acknowledged that a handful of long-recognized exceptions to birthright citizenship still exist — children of accredited foreign diplomats, for instance. The August 6 orders are built around expanding who falls into those categories.
What the Two Orders Actually Do
The first order, on limiting automatic citizenship, excludes four groups of children whose parents fall into specific categories: those working for foreign governments in the U.S., such as embassy or consular staff; those classified as "alien enemies," including members of designated foreign terrorist organizations; and those who engaged in fraud to obtain citizenship. It also reaches further than that summary suggests — it touches citizenship for children born in certain U.S. territories, such as American Samoa, where citizenship isn't established by federal statute, and separately restricts the use of surrogate mothers for the purpose of securing citizenship.
The second order, on birth tourism, is more straightforward: it directs the State Department and Homeland Security to deny or cancel visas tied to suspected birth tourism.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller framed the approach as using tools the courts have already upheld rather than defying them, telling reporters the administration was expanding definitions of ineligibility within the bounds the Supreme Court had already recognized — not creating new ones. It's worth noting for scale: outside researchers who track the practice say birth tourism is a small fraction of the roughly 3.6 million U.S. births recorded in 2025, with government data showing fewer than 10,000 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.
A Task Force's First Month, By the Numbers
The visa numbers came from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who posted on social media on August 12 that the department's Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force had revoked more than 600 visas over its first month reviewing travel and visa records. Rubio described organized rings that coach travelers to misrepresent their reasons for visiting, arrange housing, and falsify paperwork. "American citizenship is not for sale," he wrote.
Cases the department pointed to include a couple who allegedly used business conferences and vacations as cover for a trip that produced two U.S.-born children, and a foreign government official whose weeklong official visit stretched into a three-month stay that ended in childbirth. Immigration analysts are quick to note that traveling to the U.S. while pregnant isn't itself against the law — the legal exposure comes only when a traveler misrepresents their purpose to obtain the visa in the first place.
The ACLU Goes Back to a Familiar Judge
The ACLU didn't start over with a new lawsuit. On August 11, it returned to the same federal courtroom in Concord, New Hampshire, where Judge Joseph Laplante had issued the original injunction against Trump's 2025 order — an injunction the Supreme Court ultimately left standing. The filing came from the ACLU alongside its New Hampshire, Maine, and Massachusetts affiliates, plus the Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and Democracy Defenders Fund, all veterans of the original case.
Their ask was narrow but pointed: have the judge confirm that the new orders can't be used to strip citizenship from anyone already covered by the existing class-action injunction. Cody Wofsy of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project argued in a statement that the president's objection to a constitutional rule doesn't give him authority to override it, calling the pattern of renewed attempts on children's citizenship overdue for an end.
Correcting the Record on the Administration's Response
Contrary to early accounts suggesting silence from Washington, officials did respond. A White House spokesperson told reporters, "The Trump Administration has always followed court orders," maintaining that everything done since the Supreme Court's ruling lines up with the Court's own reasoning. Separately, a Justice Department spokesperson said the government remains confident in its legal footing and intends to defend the orders in court.
What Happens Next
Laplante's ruling on the ACLU's request is still pending — and procedurally, the case hadn't even formally returned to his courtroom by the time the filing was made, since the paperwork sending it back from the appeals court was still working its way through the system. The bigger question looming over both orders is whether the administration's broadened categories genuinely match the narrow, long-recognized exceptions the Supreme Court pointed to in Barbara, or whether they're the same policy in different packaging — a question likely to draw fresh briefing and, eventually, another round of appeals. Because the visa-cancellation order and the citizenship order rest on different legal theories, they may end up facing separate challenges even as the core dispute over the 14th Amendment stays the same.
