President Trump signed two new executive orders Thursday aimed at restricting birthright citizenship, a move that follows the Supreme Court's rejection of a broader attempt by his administration to challenge the long-standing policy.
The executive orders are intended to enforce a crackdown on "birth tourism," a term the administration uses to describe foreign nationals who come to the United States with the intent of giving birth and thereby securing U.S. citizenship for their child.
"People come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor, saying 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, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country, and then have a U.S. citizen child," White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said at the signing ceremony. Miller stated that "birth tourism" has been an issue for decades.
The President claimed that certain individuals were "either buying their way in" to the U.S. or "building businesses" by exploiting the country's birthright citizenship law. Trump stated Thursday that there would be "very big crackdowns" to enforce the new order.
While the administration has not provided official figures for "birth tourism," a 2026 article from the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank, estimated that census-based figures suggest between 22,000 and 26,000 such births occur annually in the U.S. Government data indicates fewer than 10,000 births in the U.S. in 2024 were to mothers with foreign addresses.