President Donald Trump signed two new executive orders on Thursday aimed at limiting birthright citizenship, just five weeks after the US Supreme Court struck down his previous attempt to do the same. The move signals that Trump, undeterred by a 6-3 court defeat in June, intends to keep pressing his decade-long campaign to narrow who qualifies for automatic US citizenship at birth.

The first order seeks to expand the categories of people whose US-born children would be ineligible for automatic citizenship, including, according to senior adviser Stephen Miller, children of members of "foreign terrorist organisations" and people who act on behalf of foreign governments. The second targets so-called "birth tourism" — the practice of travelling to the United States specifically to give birth and secure citizenship for a child. "They've taken birthright citizenship and they've made a joke out of it," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he believes his new orders are constitutional. Trump's claim that "hundreds of thousands" of people engage in birth tourism appears significantly overstated: the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates the figure at between 22,000 and 26,000 births annually, with government data suggesting just 9,600 births in 2024 to mothers with foreign addresses.

Birthright citizenship in the United States is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1868 in the aftermath of the Civil War. It declares that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens." On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order arguing that children born to parents in the country illegally or on temporary visas fell outside that protection. Lower courts blocked the order, and in June the Supreme Court upheld a broad conception of birthright citizenship, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing that the amendment's promise of citizenship was one the court was bound to keep.

Civil liberties groups moved swiftly to condemn the new orders. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) predicted they would meet the same legal fate as the last. "The Supreme Court already decided this issue: birthright citizenship is guaranteed by the Constitution. No additional executive order can change the meaning of the Constitution," said Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project.

The episode is the latest chapter in a campaign Trump has pursued since at least 2015, when he first promised to end what he called the scourge of "anchor babies" — a derogatory term for US-born children of undocumented immigrants. Legal scholars have long held that ending birthright citizenship would require a constitutional amendment, not an executive order, making Thursday's actions widely expected to face immediate court challenges. The administration's efforts sit within a broader immigration agenda that also includes mass deportations and the removal of deportation protections for nationals of more than a dozen countries.