President Donald Trump signed two executive orders Thursday in a renewed attack on birthright citizenship, just over a month after the Supreme Court struck down an earlier order heavily restricting eligibility.
The new orders are aimed at cracking down on “birth tourism” and denying citizenship to some foreign diplomats’ children born in the U.S., Trump said in the Oval Office, standing alongside White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
One order appears to instruct Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to take actions restricting visas and authorizations for immigrants who they believe want to enter the country for “birth tourism.” It is unclear how the agencies will determine whom to prosecute.
“People come here, pretend to be a tourist, pretend to be a visitor — say they want to go to Disneyland, 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,” Miller said Thursday.
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The second order — which explicitly references the June 30 Supreme Court decision that struck down Trump’s earlier attempt to more widely eliminate birthright citizenship — aims to restrict the process, including for children whose parents are foreign diplomats or are categorized by the administration as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.” Children who were born to surrogates present in the U.S. through a commercial transaction from parents abroad would also not be eligible, nor would children born in “a territory or territorial waters … where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute” should Congress change the law to end automatic citizenship for those residents in the future.
It delegates the responsibilities to carry out the order to Mullin, Rubio and the attorney general.
The Supreme Court’s ruling struck down Trump’s executive order, issued on his first day back in office, that aimed to heavily restrict who would be eligible for birthright citizenship. In a 6-3 decision, justices kept in place the 14th Amendment right of all people born in the country to be granted U.S. citizenship. Chief Justice John Roberts called Trump’s efforts a “dramatically revisionist view.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land,’” Roberts wrote in June.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote in a partial dissent that Congress could limit birthright citizenship — an issue Trump later urged lawmakers to consider.
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