The new orders come in the wake of the Supreme Court striking down an earlier Trump effort to limit birthright citizenship in the country.
Trump signs orders targeting birthright citizenship, ‘birth tourism’
President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders seeking to deny U.S. citizenship to children born through “birth tourism.”
New orders from the Trump administration prohibiting “birth tourism” at best do little to stop a small and already unlawful practice, and at worst illegally “put a question mark” on citizenship, immigration and legal experts say.
President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on Thursday, Aug. 6, aimed at stopping foreigners from coming to the United States to give birth in the country, a practice known as “birth tourism” already prohibited by federal code. Critics say such visitors are abusing birthright citizenship, the nation’s standard enshrined in the 14th Amendment that people born on American soil are U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court upheld the standard in June.
According to scholars and immigration experts, it’s unclear how Trump’s orders will stop what’s a statistically small issue in the first place. Birth tourism accounts for less than 1% of all annual births in the U.S., according to the largest estimates of the practice.
“My initial impression is that most of it is unconstitutional or in violation of federal statute,” said Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia Law School professor and author of a book on birthright citizenship. “Provisions clearly violate what the 14th Amendment has always meant and what the Supreme Court just upheld.”
At worst, critics envisioned a situation that will harm mothers needing to travel to the United States for medical care and be used as part of the administration’s efforts to denaturalize some American citizens.
“It’s about putting a question mark next to the citizenship, which is very dangerous,” David Leopold, an immigration attorney, told USA TODAY.
The Trump administration’s pair of executive orders follow the White House’s recent attempt at curbing birthright citizenship, which has been the law of the land since the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868. The administration tried to get rid of birthright citizenship in a case that went before the Supreme Court, but the nation’s top justices ruled 6-3 against the White House.
“I thought we were going to win at the Supreme Court; unfortunately, we had a bad decision, a very unfair decision. Our country suffers because of it,” Trump said in the Oval Office after signing the new executive orders. So, “we’re ending it a different way.”
How big is birth tourism?
Birth tourism is a massive problem in the eyes of the White House. In signing the executive order, Trump said hundreds of thousands of babies are born to birth tourists in the United States annually.
Studies of the issue, however, have found the practice is statistically insignificant.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, the high end of estimates says that around 26,000 such babies are born every year. More conservative estimates place the number around 10,000. Either figure constitutes less than 1% of the more than 3.5 million babies born in the country every year.
“The scale of the problem is rather small,” said Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, a Migration Policy Institute analyst who coauthored a recent study of the issue, though “it does present policy issues, including visa fraud and tax evasion.”
Birth tourism, legal experts note, is already barred by federal regulations prohibiting people from lying on visa forms and from coming to the country to have a child.
Who engages in visa tourism?
People who have studied the topic said White House descriptions of birth tourists were misleading.
Stephen Miller, a top Trump adviser seen as the architect of the president’s immigration policy, described the practice as an abuse aimed at taking advantage of the U.S. welfare system.
However, experts point out that it’s usually wealthy people who engage in the practice. Trump himself acknowledged as much when signing the orders, telling reporters that the people behind birth tourism are “multimillionaires” and “billionaires.”
“Likely because of the fees associated with being able to pay a birth tourism company, that creates an elite group of people,” Putzel-Kavanaugh said. “The intent for most mothers was the idea of providing U.S. citizenship as the gold standard of what they could provide for their child for their future.”
According to the Migration Policy Institute, fees for such services reportedly range from $20,000 to $100,000. Among people who participated were Chinese mothers looking to have a second child during the era of the country’s one-child policy. Others are wealthy people coming from countries where the government is regarded as less stable.
Some such births are facilitated by illegal birth tourism companies. In 2019, the federal government prosecuted a Chinese man for operating a birth tourism company in California called You Win USA Vacation Services Corp. that facilitated the births of some 500 children.
The company charged customers between $40,000 and $80,000 in order to be set up in an apartment in Irvine, California, leading up to the birth of the child, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Born in the USA
But experts note that children are not responsible for their parents’ crimes, and birthright citizenship is well-established in the text of the 14th Amendment and was again upheld by the Supreme Court.
The high court struck down on June 30 an earlier Trump executive order aimed at limiting birthright citizenship. The justices said the president cannot change the definition of birthright citizenship with the stroke of a pen, and that Trump’s push threatened to upend how the constitutional guarantee had historically been understood.
Birthright citizenship, scholars say, is a bedrock American principle.
“‘Born in the USA’ is a phrase that carries power,” said Frost, the University of Virginia scholar. “This goes to the heart of what it means to be an American. We’re a country founded on the idea that we reject hereditary status, titles of nobility; we reject any kind of lineage-backed definition of citizenship. To be an American is to be here.”
Putting a question mark on citizenship
Some critics said that whether the new executive orders are illegal or redundant is beside the point when the intent is to call into question the citizenship status of some Americans.
“This is about putting a question mark next to somebody’s citizenship, whether the parent was in the country without authorization or whether the mother came here as a visitor,” said Leopold, the immigration attorney.
Leopold noted the administration has already made attempts to strip citizenship from Americans. Among such efforts, a June 2025 Department of Justice memo instructed government lawyers to attempt to “revoke a person’s United States citizenship” from people who became citizens “illegally.”
He added: “It’s one more part of their all-out assault on immigration, on the people who have naturalized, on groups of Americans they don’t believe should be in this country.”