President Donald Trump has been fighting to end the birthright citizenship scam since his first day back in office.
The Supreme Court tried to stop him, but Trump isn’t done.
And now he just signed an order that has birth tourism operators around the world scrambling to figure out what happens next.
Trump Goes Back on Offense After Supreme Court Setback
President Trump signed two executive orders seeking to narrow birthright citizenship in several circumstances and intensify the federal crackdown on commercial “birth tourism.”
Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump denounced the Supreme Court for making a “very unfortunate decision” in striking down his initial effort to limit birthright citizenship.
“They’ve taken birthright citizenship and they’ve made a joke out of it,” said Trump, adding that his administration is “making adjustments” to its approach.
In its 6-to-3 decision issued in June 2026, the court struck down the president’s 2025 executive order, which sought to strip citizenship from American children born to undocumented parents. But Trump made clear in the Oval Office that a court ruling was not going to be the end of the story.
Trump called the Supreme Court decision “very unfortunate,” saying the birthright citizenship clause of the Constitution was intended after the Civil War only “for the babies of slaves.”
Trump maintained that the original birthright citizenship was for “the babies of slaves.” “What’s happening now are people are building businesses around it; wealthy people are building businesses around birthright citizenship,” he said. “That’s not the way it’s supposed to work.”
What the Orders Actually Do
The first executive order non-exhaustively identifies certain categories of children of aliens who are not entitled to birthright citizenship consistent with historical exceptions to birthright citizenship recognized by the Supreme Court.
Stephen Miller said people who would be ineligible to obtain citizenship by birthright would include “alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments.”
A second order seeks to curb what Trump called “birth tourism” by increasing restrictions on visitors to the US who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.
The order describes the practice as “schemes,” which has produced “thriving industries around the world that profit by enabling the evasion of American immigration law to obtain citizenship and other immigration benefits.”
That is exactly the right word for it. These are not families pursuing the American dream. They are running a business model built on a loophole, and their children’s citizenship becomes the anchor that eventually pulls entire extended families into the country through chain migration.
Miller said the problem is “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 argued Trump has the authority to act under Section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, a statute he said is “very rarely used, probably one of the strongest laws in the entire federal code.”
“If you’re telling a consular officer you’re here as a tourist, but your true purpose and intent is to go to a baby mill, give birth, and try to mint an American citizen while you’re here, then you’re committing a fraud against the American government, and by definition, that visa can and should and will be now denied,” Miller said.
“So that practice of birth tourism is, as of the signing of this order, hereby banned. And what that means is that no one in the world is any more allowed to obtain a visa for this fraudulent purpose,” Miller said.
The second executive order delegates presidential authorities to the Secretary of State and Secretary of Homeland Security and directs them to halt the practice of birth tourism.
The Left Is Already Gearing Up for Another Court Fight
Predictably, the ACLU wasted no time announcing it plans to fight the new orders in court.
“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. Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
And Trump’s answer to that was essentially: watch me.
Asked if he thinks these new executive orders will pass constitutional muster, the president said, “I think it will.”
The 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868. The men who wrote it had just fought a war to end slavery. The idea that the same clause was secretly intended to guarantee citizenship to the children of Russian oligarchs who fly into Miami through a birth tourism company — or to the children of foreign nationals who lie on their visa applications — is the kind of legal fiction that no serious person should accept with a straight face.
The crux of the administration’s argument has been that the 14th Amendment was meant to apply only to the children born to newly freed slaves and had been misinterpreted since its ratification in 1868.
That is a reasonable reading of the historical record. And Trump is not the first person to make it. Legal scholars have debated this for decades. The notion that the question is permanently settled and beyond any further examination is itself a political position, not a legal one.
The congressional report cited in the administration’s brief “talks about certain hotspots, like Russian elites coming to Miami through these birth tourism companies,” according to US Solicitor General John Sauer.
Birth tourism is not a fringe concern. It is a documented, organized industry. Companies in China, Russia, and elsewhere openly advertise packages to help wealthy clients give birth on American soil. The anchor baby mechanism is then used to establish a legal foothold for the entire extended family. The United States is one of the only developed nations in the world that still allows this, and no one voted for it.
Trump called birthright citizenship “a disgrace,” saying, “They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
That is the plain truth of what is happening. A policy that was written to guarantee dignity to formerly enslaved Americans has been twisted into a commercial product sold by immigration consultants to foreign nationals who have no intention of becoming Americans in any meaningful sense.
The left will run to the courts again. That much is certain. But Trump is working within the exceptions the Supreme Court itself acknowledged, and Stephen Miller has invoked a statutory authority that gives the executive branch real power over who gets a visa and why. This fight is not over, and the administration knows it.
What matters right now is that the President of the United States looked at a broken system, refused to accept a court loss as the final word, and came back with a sharper tool. That is exactly the kind of persistence the American people sent him back to Washington, DC to deliver.
Sources: Breitbart News, CBS News, ABC News, The Hill, Axios, White House Fact Sheet, Al Jazeera
