Trump Signs Narrower Citizenship Orders While Again Arguing the 14th Amendment Was Intended for the “Babies of Slaves”
Donald Trump is again attempting to restrict birthright citizenship, signing two executive orders Thursday that target certain U.S.-born children and people who travel to the United States to give birth.
The new actions come just weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Trump’s broader effort to deny citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented or temporarily in the country. The Court ruled June 30 in Trump v. Barbara that those children are protected by the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause.
Trump acknowledged the setback while announcing the new orders from the Oval Office.
“I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court,” Trump said, according to The Associated Press. “Unfortunately, we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it and we’re ending it a different way.”
The president also returned to an argument that figured prominently in the previous birthright citizenship fight: that the 14th Amendment was adopted specifically to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved Black Americans and their children.
“This was done right after the Civil War,” Trump said. “This was for the babies of slaves.” The remark was also highlighted by TheGrio in its coverage of the new executive actions.
New Trump Order Narrows Who Can Receive Birthright Citizenship
One order, titled “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” is considerably narrower than Trump’s original January 2025 directive.
It directs federal agencies not to recognize citizenship in several specified circumstances when neither parent is already a U.S. citizen.
Those categories include children whose parent is considered an “alien enemy,” including certain designated terrorists; children of ambassadors and some other foreign government or international organization employees; and cases in which a parent allegedly used fraud or a commercial transaction to obtain citizenship for a child. The order also includes commercial arrangements designed to bring a mother or surrogate into the United States specifically to give birth.
Federal departments including the State Department, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration are directed to bring their policies into compliance with the order and issue implementation guidance within 30 days.
Whether all of those categories can constitutionally be excluded from citizenship is expected to become another legal battleground.
Trump Moves Against ‘Birth Tourism’
Trump’s second executive order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” focuses on foreign nationals who use nonimmigrant visas to travel to the United States for the purpose of giving birth.
The administration defines birth tourism as entering the country on a nonimmigrant visa specifically to give birth on U.S. soil, or helping another foreign national do so.
The order authorizes the State and Homeland Security departments to take actions that could include denying or revoking visas, denying entry, removing people who previously engaged in birth tourism and permanently barring some participants from entering the United States. It also targets businesses and organizations that facilitate such trips.
Trump accused companies involved in the practice of building businesses around obtaining U.S. citizenship for children born here.
“That’s not the way it was supposed to work. It’s a disgrace,” Trump said Thursday. “They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
Reports have noted visa fraud related to traveling specifically to obtain citizenship for a child was already prohibited and that previous administrations have prosecuted operators accused of helping pregnant women conceal the purpose of their trips.
Justice Jackson Rejected Narrow Reading of 14th Amendment
Trump’s reference to the “babies of slaves” echoes an argument that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson confronted directly in her concurring opinion in the Supreme Court’s June ruling.
Jackson agreed that the Citizenship Clause was adopted after the Civil War amid an effort to overturn the legacy of Dred Scott and guarantee Black Americans citizenship. But she rejected the idea that its protections were therefore limited to formerly enslaved people or those in comparable circumstances.
She wrote that such a reading bore “little relationship” to the amendment’s ratification history and described the Reconstruction Amendments as an “anticaste, antisubordination reset for the Nation,” rather than simply a remedy confined to slavery.
Related: Ketanji Brown Jackson Accuses Clarence Thomas of ‘Narrow Vision’ in Birthright Citizenship Ruling
Jackson also pointed to Black political organizing after emancipation. Freed Black Americans, she wrote, did not seek citizenship rules that benefited only themselves or excluded other marginalized groups. Instead, their arguments centered on broader principles of equality and citizenship by birth.
The Court ultimately held that children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully or temporarily present are subject to U.S. jurisdiction and therefore citizens at birth under the 14th Amendment.
Another Court Fight Is Expected
The American Civil Liberties Union has already signaled that at least portions of Trump’s latest effort could face the same fate as the first.
“The Supreme Court already decided this issue: Birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said Thursday.
“No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution,” he added.
The new orders nevertheless represent a different legal strategy. Rather than again attempting to broadly exclude children based primarily on their parents’ immigration status, the administration is targeting narrower categories involving foreign government ties, alleged fraud and travel specifically arranged to secure citizenship through childbirth.
How far a president can go in creating those exceptions without Congress or a constitutional amendment is now likely to become the next chapter in a fight the Supreme Court appeared to settle only weeks ago.
