A coalition of civil rights groups has asked a federal judge to declare that a recent Supreme Court ruling protecting birthright citizenship strikes down two new executive orders President Donald Trump signed to limit the constitutional right he opposes.
The June 30 decision in Trump v. Barbara affirmed that the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the country except for the children of diplomats or enemy forces in the U.S.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority in the 6-3 decision. “The Framers of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ Under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
Trump responded on Aug. 6 with “Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship” and “Ending Birth Tourism,” executive orders attempting to circumvent the high court ruling by expanding the categories of people already denied citizenship at birth under the Constitution.
But the legal coalition that defeated Trump’s initial effort to limit birthright citizenship filed a motion Aug. 11 asking U.S. District Judge Joseph Laplante to bar the administration from taking any action to implement the new executive orders.
The motion also asks Laplante to apply his previous injunction against Trump’s 2025 executive order to cover the new directives. That initial order sought to deny citizenship to babies born to undocumented immigrants or to those whose parents were in the country with temporary visas. That injunction and others like it led to the Supreme Court’s birthright citizenship ruling in Barbara.
Cody Wofsy
“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right, and he may not like that he lost in the Supreme Court, but that is really beside the point,” said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project and lead counsel in Trump v. Barbara. “It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”
Aarti Kohli
The Supreme Court could not have made it any clearer that Trump’s effort to limit birthright citizenship is unlawful, said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus. “As the court has already affirmed, it’s the Constitution, not the president, who determines who is American and who gets a say in our democracy. Americans are struggling to put food on the table and pay their bills, and this administration is just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.”
Trump’s latest attempts to redefine constitutional birthright protections is narrower than his first unsuccessful go-around.
The president’s new targets include the newborns of foreign nationals working in the U.S. for other countries, which is an expansion of the 14th Amendment’s exclusion of the children born to foreign diplomats. The category of children born to enemy occupiers is stretched to include those the administration deems to be members of terrorist organizations.
The order on “birth tourism” attempts to ban women from traveling to the United States under false pretenses for the sole purpose of giving birth to American-citizen children.
“Birth tourism … undermines the integrity of the nation’s immigration system by enabling foreign nationals to exploit their temporary admission to obtain permanent immigration-related benefits,” the order asserts.
The practice also denies visas to legitimate applicants while eroding “public confidence in the faithful enforcement of the immigration laws and impairs the executive branch’s ability to protect the national security,” Trump said.
Trump’s order echoes a popular anti-immigrant theme: “Birth tourism operators use deceptive advertisements and inducements to entice foreign nationals to travel to the United States for the purpose of giving birth on American soil. They promise citizenship; access to public benefits; and short-term stays in specialized facilities, hotels or rentals, but often fail to deliver on these promises.”
While the Migration Policy Institute estimated instances of birth tourism to be “rare” at 24,000 to 26,000 births a year, the White House on Aug. 12 announced the formation of a State Department task force to combat the practice.
“The Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force reviews the activities of visa holders worldwide to identify instances of birth tourism, take action to revoke visas of those who engage in or facilitate it, and dismantle the networks that profit from this abuse,” according to the announcement.
Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and his wife, Katie Miller, an aide for DOGE, attend the White House Easter Egg Roll on Monday, April 21, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
The bottom line is that the world should consider the “birth tourism” industry closed in the U.S., Trump immigration policy architect Stephen Miller said in the Oval Office as the executive orders were being signed.
The aim is to prevent a woman “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 automatic citizen. So that practice of birth tourism is, as of the signing of this order, hereby banned,” Miller said.
But such declarations are premature, according to attorneys who helped defeat the president’s first effort to limit birthright citizenship.
“President Trump’s latest attempt to chip away at birthright citizenship is as constitutionally futile as it is cruel,” said Norm Eisen, executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund. “We’ve seen this strategy from this administration before, and the courts have repeatedly made it clear that the 14th Amendment cannot be rewritten by executive fiat. We are filing this motion to ensure that the protections currently shielding our clients remain intact — we will not let the administration use babies as pawns in a political stunt like this.”
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