WASHINGTON D.C Aug 6, 2026 — President Donald Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders aimed at protecting what the administration calls the “meaning and value of American citizenship,” one day after describing a recent Supreme Court ruling as “very unfortunate.”
The first order non-exhaustively identifies certain categories of children of non-citizens who are not entitled to automatic birthright citizenship, consistent with historical exceptions recognized by the Supreme Court in its June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said those categories include children of “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.”
The second order directs the secretaries of State and Homeland Security to halt the practice of birth tourism — the practice of foreign nationals traveling to the United States primarily to give birth so their child receives U.S. citizenship. Miller called the ban one of the administration’s most significant actions, stating that “no one in the world is anymore allowed to obtain a visa for this fraudulent purpose” and that it “ends what has been one of the gravest and most egregious abuses of the American system and it keeps American citizenship sacred.”
In remarks captured in an official White House rapid-response post, Trump said: “We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright [citizenship] … so we’re making adjustments.”
The orders come roughly five weeks after the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling in Trump v. Barbara, struck down a broader executive order Trump issued on his first day in office that sought to deny citizenship to most children born in the United States to parents who are unlawfully present or on temporary visas. The Court held that the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause generally grants citizenship to children born on U.S. soil who are subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.
Administration officials described the new measures as narrower and grounded in the historical exceptions the Court itself acknowledged. A White House fact sheet stated that the orders continue to guard against “efforts to obtain citizenship by malign foreign actors and other categories of aliens whom the Supreme Court recognized are ineligible for birthright citizenship under historically recognized exceptions.”
Birth tourism has long been restricted by federal regulation prohibiting tourist visas issued primarily for the purpose of obtaining citizenship for a child. Estimates of the scale of the practice vary; analyses have put the number of such births in the range of roughly 10,000 to 26,000 annually in recent years.
The new orders apply prospectively and are expected to face legal challenges, as did the earlier, broader attempt. Trump signed the documents in the Oval Office on Thursday afternoon.
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