US President Donald Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders aimed at restricting eligibility for birthright citizenship and banning “birth tourism”. The White House announced the orders, which come just over a month after the US Supreme Court rejected Trump’s first attempt to restrict the guarantee of birthright citizenship enshrined in the US Constitution, reports infohub.kz.
Trump has long sought to dismantle the principle of birthright citizenship, making it a top priority of his second-term immigration crackdown. The new orders expand the definitions of children the White House deems ineligible for birthright citizenship and seek to ban “birth tourism”, which the president told reporters is practiced by hundreds of thousands of people.
However, according to the Migration Policy Institute, the highest census-based estimate puts birth tourism at 22,000 to 26,000 babies born annually on US soil, although government data show just 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.
Interestingly, Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was born a US citizen to a non-citizen mother who arrived in the US five months pregnant.