RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Donald Trump is trying again to scale back birthright citizenship in the US, weeks after the Supreme Court shot down his previous attempt to eliminate the right.
The president signed two executive orders on Thursday, including one that expands the existing definitions of non-citizens whose children are not eligible for birthright citizenship.
The second order bans so-called birth tourism, the practice of pregnant mothers coming to the US to give birth so that their babies will be citizens.
"This should have happened years ago, but we're taking care of it now," Trump said from the Oval Office, criticising the Supreme Court's rejection of his previous bid to end the 150-year-old policy.
"My Administration has guarded against the risks posed by malign foreign actors who attempt to swindle American citizens by taking advantage of the generosity of our Nation," the first executive order says.
That order prohibits the automatic citizenship of babies born in the United States to two non-citizen parents where one of the parents is: a member of a foreign terrorist group, a foreign government employee, has attempted to gain citizenship through fraudulent means, or is living in US territories where citizenship is not conferred by federal statute.
Birthright citizenship for people born in US territories such as Puerto Rico is codified by federal statute.
Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly railed against birth tourism, including accusing Russian and Chinese adversaries of taking advantage of birthright citizenship to infiltrate the US.
While announcing the executive orders from the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump said that hundreds of thousands of babies have been born through birth tourism in the US.
The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, has said that the most expansive census-based estimate accounts for about 22,000 to 26,000 babies born in the US from birth tourism every year. Government data, according to the institute, showed that there were 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.
"The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor," Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday.
"But the real reason they're here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child," he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and "all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans".
Miller said the president has the authority to ban birth tourism under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which grants the president the power to set exceptions and limitations on who can enter into the country.
On one of his first back days in office in 2025, Trump signed an executive order that tried to end birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
A legal battle brought the case to the Supreme Court, which in June ruled that Trump's 2025 policies could not stand and birthright citizenship remained the law.
The decision was a major blow to Trump's ongoing efforts to limit who can live, work, and become citizens in the US.
The high court made "a bad decision, very unfair decision", Trump said from the Oval Office on Thursday while announcing the executive orders. "Our country suffers because of it, and we're ending in a different way."
Gabriel Chin, a professor at the University of California Davis' School of Law, told the BBC that while parts of the order might hold up, other aspects "raise some serious constitutional questions".
Chin said the president does have some power to restrict people coming into the US specifically for the purposes of having a child.
"But once it does happen, once a child is born in the United States, I don't think the president has any power to decide that that child is not a citizen," he said, adding that the issue was settled in the Trump administration's recent loss in the Supreme Court.
He called birth tourism a "drop in the bucket" against the millions of births in the US.
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