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President Donald Trump on Thursday signed two executive orders targeting birthright citizenship and birth tourism, saying his administration is taking a new approach after what he called a “very unfortunate” Supreme Court ruling.
“We’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair,” Trump said. “They’re building businesses around birthright citizenship. That’s not the way it was supposed to work. It’s a disgrace. They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
The moves come after the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s earlier executive order seeking to limit automatic birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.
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President Donald Trump speaks during an event in the Oval Office of the White House Thursday in Washington, D.C. (Getty Images)
White House officials said the new directives rely on existing executive and immigration authorities and are intended to narrow eligibility for automatic citizenship in certain cases while cracking down on foreigners who travel to the United States to give birth.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said the first order expands the categories of people the administration considers ineligible for birthright citizenship, including “alien enemies of the United States, members of foreign terrorist organizations, and large categories of people who lobby and act on behalf of foreign governments.”
Miller said the second order is “for the first time ever in American history to ban birth tourism.” He said the administration will deny visas to people who seek to enter the United States “to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen” as well as those who organize such trips. Citing Section 215(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, Miller called birth tourism “by definition, a fraud on the American system” and “a fraud against the American government.”
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White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller said the first order expands the categories of people the administration considers ineligible for birthright citizenship. (Eva Marie Uzcategui / AFP via Getty Images, File)
Asked how the administration plans to enforce the order, Trump said: “We’re cracking down very big, very big, big crackdowns… this will give us the right to do it in a much more forceful manner.” When asked whether the orders would survive court challenges, Trump replied, “I think it will.”
White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said the orders target organized birth tourism operations through visa denials and law enforcement, arguing the administration was relying on “legally validated means” that do not conflict with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Trump called the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling on the matter “very unfortunate.” (Kevin Carter/Getty Images, File)
The White House had not yet released the text of the executive orders as of publication time.
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The White House did not immediately respond to Digital’s request for additional comment.
