The American Civil Liberties Union condemned President Donald Trump's latest attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, arguing that two new executive orders signed Thursday conflict with a recent Supreme Court ruling affirming the constitutional right.
"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 in a statement. "No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution."
Trump signed two orders on Thursday seeking narrower ways to limit automatic citizenship for certain children born in the United States after the Supreme Court struck down his previous effort in June.
One order would deny citizenship to children born to people the administration classifies as "alien enemies," members of foreign terrorist organizations or foreign lobbyists. The second targets so-called birth tourism, declaring children ineligible for citizenship when their parents allegedly obtained tourist visas fraudulently for the purpose of giving birth in the U.S.
"We had a bad decision, very unfair decision," Trump said Thursday. "Our country suffers because of it, and we're ending it a different way."
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued that using a tourist visa while intending to give birth constitutes fraud and could invalidate the parent's legal status. There is no official government estimate for birth tourism, though fewer than 10,000 babies were born in the U.S. to people with foreign addresses in 2024, according to CDC data analyzed by the Migration Policy Institute.
Legal experts quoted in reports on the orders questioned whether either approach could survive judicial review. University of Virginia immigration law professor Amanda Frost said the president cannot deny citizenship to a U.S.-born child simply because a parent violated immigration law, while Cato Institute immigration expert David Bier said the measures appear inconsistent with the Supreme Court's ruling.
In June, the Supreme Court struck down Trump's executive order seeking to strip citizenship from children born in the United States to undocumented parents, ruling in Trump v. Barbara, a case brought by the ACLU and several partner organizations.
The 6-3 decision reaffirmed that birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution and rejected the administration's attempt to redefine who qualifies as an American citizen through executive action.
The ACLU said on Thursday that Trump's latest orders are likely to face the same constitutional obstacle. "Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship," Wofsy said, "will meet the same fate as the last one."
