President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Thursday aimed at ending birth tourism in the United States and restricting birthright citizenship, according to White House officials. The president signed the orders with his top aide, Stephen Miller, at the White House in front of reporters.
Miller explained that the first order would expand definitions of people ineligible for birthright citizenship in response to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that maintained the policy. Those newly excluded include “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, which Miller described as historic, bans birth tourism for the first time in American history. “The idea that people come here pretending to be a tourist,” Miller said, “saying they want to go to Disneyland or visit a monument, but the real reason they’re here is to have a child and make that child an automatic citizen.”
Miller added that the practice of birth tourism would now be banned, stating: “No one in the world is anymore allowed to obtain a visa for this fraudulent purpose.”
Trump criticized the Supreme Court ruling on birthright citizenship. “I thought we were going to win it at the Supreme Court,” he said. “Unfortunately we had a bad decision, very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it. And we’re ending it a different way.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council immediately criticized the orders on social media. “This new order is far less sweeping than the original, but like the first order, seemingly violates the Constitution,” he said. “As an initial matter, the new EO aims to deny citizenship to children born to two noncitizen parents where ONE parent (not both) falls within one of the EO’s new categories. This alone may well be a violation of the 14th Amendment, which cares about the status of both parents.”
