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Washington — President Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders in his latest effort to refuse citizenship to some children born in the United States, after the Supreme Court struck down his earlier executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship.
“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright, it was close,” Mr. Trump said in an Oval Office signing on Thursday. “But a very, very unfortunate decision. So we’re making adjustments.”
One order the president signed Thursday targets commercial “birth tourism,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said, while the other expands the definitions of people ineligible for birthright citizenship, such as children of foreign citizens who lobby on behalf of foreign governments.
“This has been something that people have talked about, not only for years, but for decades,” Miller said of “birth tourism.”
“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,” Miller said. “It gives them access, under this broken system, to welfare benefits, ultimately to the voting booth, and all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.”
Axios first reported Mr. Trump would be signing the orders.
Mr. Trump has long voiced his frustration with birthright citizenship, and he and his allies have sought to make the case that the amendment was only intended to address the aftermath of slavery.
“This was done right after the Civil War,” Mr. Trump said Thursday. “This was for the babies of slaves.”
The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, states “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 ruled 6-3 that the president’s first executive order, which he issued on his first day in office in 2025, was unlawful and out of step with the 14th Amendment.
Asked if he thinks these new executive orders will pass constitutional muster, the president said, “I think it will.”
“Birth tourism” came up during Supreme Court oral arguments. In regard to that issue, Chief Justice John Roberts told the U.S. solicitor general, John Sauer, “You do agree that that has no impact on the legal analysis before us.” Sauer said that such tourism is evidence of the negative effects of the prevailing interpretation of the Citizenship Clause.
“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,” Sauer said.
“Well, it’s a new world. It’s the same Constitution,” Roberts replied.
