The president is still not happy with the recent Supreme Court decision affirming the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship. In response, he has issued two new executive orders.
This first, "Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," attempts to expand historical exceptions to the 14th Amendment's Citizenship Clause by declaring certain categories of children ineligible for automatic U.S. citizenship.
It targets babies born to non-citizen parents where a parent is an employee or representative of a foreign government, such as foreign embassy or consulate staff, a member or affiliate of a designated foreign terrorist organization, considered an "alien enemy" of the United States, or engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship or legal status.
Art Arthur, a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, says this will "force the courts to reconsider the exceptions to birthright citizenship that they've already recognized."
"It's going to be good from a political standpoint because in essence, the people who are going to be challenging these provisions are the third secretary at the Chinese Embassy to the U.N., or a Tren de Aragua member in the United States," Arthur explains. "Those are the sorts of challenges that the Trump administration wants from both a legal perspective and a political one."
And Arthur says the second order, which directs the secretary of state and the secretary of homeland security to take concrete regulatory and operational steps to curb the practice of "birth tourism," increases restrictions on visitors to the U.S. who want to obtain visas to give birth while in the country.
Roger Severino of The Heritage Foundation recently told American Family Radio that takes aim at foreign nationals exploiting U.S. laws through birth tourism and commercial surrogacy.
"It focuses on the boat that the anchor is meant to tie," he said. "The boat is, of course, the parents. My suggestion is if anybody engages in birth tourism, or if you're two illegal alien parents giving birth to a child in the U.S., you are now persona non grata — the parents cannot step foot into the United States legally."
The Heritage Foundation is encouraging the Trump administration to leverage presidential authority under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(f) to, among other things, place permanent entry bans on parents who engage in birth tourism unless they voluntarily relinquish the child's citizenship.
The proposal is part of a new multi-front push conservatives have launched against birthright citizenship following the Supreme Court ruling that Severino said overlooks U.S. territories like the Northern Mariana Islands, which remain major targets for foreign abuse.
"China has exploited access to the territories," he noted. "There you had more Chinese being born than native born in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands."
The Supreme Court said nothing about territories, but President Trump's order bans birth tourism there. It also clamps down on commercial surrogacy operations that allow foreign nationals to obtain U.S. passports for newborns before taking them overseas.
Severino noted that targeting these commercial loopholes is critical to dismantling pre-arranged citizenship schemes in which Chinese businessmen pay for poor American women to have their babies so that they're born in the U.S. and then they could ship them right back to China.
Conservatives want Congress to codify President Trump's executive actions into permanent federal law to ensure future administrations cannot roll them back, and Heritage scholars are also calling on state governments to challenge federal precedents on public benefit access.
"It's determining who gets to be an American," Severino told Jenna Ellis. "That's fundamentally what the question is about: Do Americans get to determine who Americans are or will be, or is it foreigners, who have no connection to this country, who abuse our laws and engage in things like birth tourism?"
Proponents argue that combining executive action, congressional legislation, and local legal challenges will ultimately force the Supreme Court to limit birthright guarantees.
"As long as Donald Trump is president, or as long as there is a Republican president who agrees with limiting birthright citizenship, the executive branch is going to continue to bring challenges that it can use to narrow or overturn the decision," Arthur tells AFN. "That's the whole point."
