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source_url: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-08-06/after-supreme-court-loss-trump-again-targets-birthright-citizenship-with-new-orders
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After Supreme Court loss, Trump again targets birthright citizenship with new orders
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- President Trump signed new executive orders to crack down on so-called birth tourism and restrict which children of immigrants qualify for U.S. citizenship.
- Constitutional scholars, civil rights groups and California officials argue the orders defy the 14th Amendment and the court’s ruling.
President Trump has again targeted birthright citizenship, signing a pair of executive orders purporting to narrow it by [cracking down on “birth tourism”](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/ending-birth-tourism/) and limiting [which children born to immigrants in the U.S. qualify](https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/continuing-to-protect-the-meaning-and-value-of-american-citizenship/).
The new orders follow a [U.S. Supreme Court ruling in June](https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2026-06-30/supreme-court-rejects-trumps-plan-to-limit-birthright-citizenship) that rejected an attempt by Trump to end birthright citizenship outright.
During a signing ceremony Thursday in the Oval Office, Trump called that decision by the high court “very unfair” and said the new orders were an attempt to end birthright citizenship by other means.
“Our country suffers because of it, and we’re ending it a different way,” he said.
Trump promised “big crackdowns” on birth tourism, or the practice of pregnant foreign women coming to the United States, or foreign men using surrogates already in the U.S., specifically to ensure their children receive U.S. citizenship.
Trump said an entire industry has been built up around the practice, turning birthright citizenship into “a joke.”
“Wealthy people are building businesses around birthright citizenship. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. It’s a disgrace,” he said. “They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
The orders were immediately criticized by proponents of birthright citizenship as an indefensible attempt by the president and his administration to make an end run around the Supreme Court’s clear finding that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution cannot be undone by the president.
The justices said Trump may not revise the Constitution and change citizenship laws in an executive order.
The amendment reads in part, “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.”
In an apparent response to the president’s new orders, California [Gov. Gavin Newsom posted](https://x.com/GavinNewsom/status/2085488306519949661) that exact language to the social media platform X. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) [also responded](https://x.com/SenAlexPadilla/status/2085498293291765865) on the platform, writing, “Trump doesn’t understand the Constitution — but the 14th Amendment’s promise of birthright citizenship and equality speaks for itself.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement that Trump’s “continued crusade to end birthright citizenship is blatantly illegal,” that Democrats would challenge the orders, and that the president had “set himself up for yet another loss in the courts.”
“If you are born in America, you are American — period. The Constitution says it and the Supreme Court has affirmed it,” Schumer said.
A spokesperson for California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office, which successfully sued alongside other Democrat-led states to block Trump’s first order purporting to end birthright citizenship, said attorneys there were reviewing the latest orders late Thursday.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which also sued to block the first order, denounced the new orders — and predicted they too would fall.
“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,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one.”
Trump’s order on birth tourism defines the practice as “the entry of any foreign national into the United States via a nonimmigrant visa for the purpose of giving birth on American soil,” or “any effort by any foreign national to facilitate” such entry.
It orders the Homeland Security and State departments to ramp up controls to block such entries, including through the denial or revocation of visas and other travel authorizations for individuals suspecting of participating in such efforts.
“Foreign nationals seeking temporary admission into the United States ... cannot be permitted to circumvent the immigration laws in an attempt to vest themselves and their children with lasting benefits that are irreconcilable with their nonimmigrant status,” the order reads.
The order purporting to limit which children born in the U.S. are eligible for birthright citizenship describes “certain categories of children” who it says “do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship as announced by the Supreme Court.”
It orders U.S. agencies not to provide citizenship documents to any child whose parents are not citizens if either of their parents is a foreign government employee, ambassador or a member of a foreign terrorist organization; was “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship” for them or to ensure their mother was in the U.S. when she gave birth to them; or had paid for a surrogate in the U.S. to give birth to them.
Birth tourism facilitated by moneymaking ventures has long been targeted by U.S. officials.
A little over a decade ago, a major investigation into the practice occurred [in California](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-birth-tourism-schemes-raids-20150303-story.html), with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials [raiding so-called birth hotels](https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-birth-tourism-persists-20161220-story.html) in Riverside, Rowland Heights and Irvine and accusing their operators of assisting Chinese birth tourists fraudulently obtain visas under false pretenses.
Officials and immigration advocates have debated the scale of such operations in the U.S. But Republicans have for years called for fixes. A few years ago, Senate Republicans [issued a report](https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/imo/media/doc/2022.12.20-%20Final_Birth%20Tourism%20Report.pdf) stating that as birth tourism had become “more prevalent, a cottage industry developed with entire companies catering to these individuals.”
The report determined that birth tourism “demeans the naturalization process by monetizing the privilege of U.S. citizenship,” and that the State Department and Customs and Border Protection should “work together to better understand the breadth of birth tourism in the United States.”
A [report in April](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/journal/policy-beat/though-rare-birth-tourism-united-states-sparks-outsized-concern) by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute found the practice was relatively rare, especially given the tremendous attention it has attracted from the Trump administration.
“The most expansive albeit contested estimate based on review of U.S. Census Bureau data is that up to 26,000 babies born in the United States annually could be attributed to birth tourism — a tiny fraction of the more than 3.5 million U.S. births yearly,” the report said.
Echoing arguments made before the Supreme Court in defense of Trump’s first order, the president and other White House officials claimed Thursday that birthright citizenship was only ever intended for the children of enslaved Americans.
“This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves,” Trump said.
Others have said that argument [“disregards the historical record”](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/30/opinion/birthright-citizenship-supreme-court.html) — which clearly shows lawmakers understood that the amendment’s language was much broader than that.
In [an analysis](https://ccgh.substack.com/p/birthright-citizenship-attack-renews?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3466464&post_id=210227183&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=2nlca&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email) of the executive orders, César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a professor at Ohio State University whose work focuses on the intersection of criminal and immigration law, said Friday that Trump’s arguments are “legally dubious” for most of the categories of people he is attempting to exclude from citizenship.
García Hernández referenced Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who noted in the majority opinion of the recent birthright citizenship case that the 14th Amendment doesn’t reference a child’s parents “for a simple reason: they did not matter.”
García Hernández said that would seem to include children born to surrogates, those with politically disfavored views or who engage in crime. The most likely legal challenges could come from children whose parents are based in the U.S. while they work for the United Nations, a similar international organization or who are born to surrogates, he said.
“At best, the administration may find some leeway to bar children born to a larger group of foreign-government employees than is currently the practice in the United States,” he said. “On a practical level, it’s hard to imagine how the Trump administration will apply the president’s directive to children born to terrorist groups.”
White House officials said the orders would prevent a large number of children from receiving birthright citizenship, hailing it as momentous.
“It ends what has been one of the gravest and most egregious abuses of the American system, and it keeps American citizenship safe,” said Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s top advisors on immigration.
Asked whether the new orders would withstand judicial scrutiny, Trump predicted they would, before directing the question to White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf.
In President Trump’s second year back in the White House, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court punctured his claim to have power with no limits.
“What we’re doing is taking legally validated means that are clearly within our disposal and targeting them square on to this birth tourism industry,” Scharf said. “There’s absolutely nothing in here that runs afoul of any of the Supreme Court’s opinions on the subject.”
In its 6-3 decision in June, the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s first order purporting to end birthright citizenship outright, finding that the 14th Amendment — with very few exceptions — provided a right to children born in the U.S. that could not be undone by the president.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote for the court. “The Framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Roberts in full, with Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh concurring with the outcome based on separate federal law. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
The ruling was a major defeat for Trump and was cheered by immigrant rights advocates, including many in California, as the final say on the matter, though Trump signaled almost immediately that the fight wasn’t over.
Times staff writer Andrea Castillo in Washington contributed to this report.