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| Bruno Curly /PEXELS |
The Trump administration is doing its best to creatively prevent birthplace citizenship for foreign nationals despite the recent SCOTUS ruling.
Despite a disastrously anti-American Supreme Court ruling on birthplace citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump proves determined to keep advancing his position on American citizenship despite opposition from the court. While even stronger measures of resistance would be justified, it is clear President Trump’s administration is doing its best to creatively prevent birthplace citizenship for foreign nationals while technically abiding within the confines of the Supreme Court’s decision.Many options remain available for President Trump to curtail birthplace citizenship, which include exercising departmentalism, clearly defining the exceptions to the general rule of birthplace citizenship supported by the court, tightly controlling the issuance of visas to foreign visitors, shutting down the birth tourism industry, pressuring Congress to amend federal statutes, and generally advancing remigration as much as possible.
New Executive Orders
In Wong Kim Ark v. U.S. (1898) and most recently with Trump v. Barbara (2026), the Supreme Court had held that birthplace citizenship is not recognized for children of foreign diplomats residing in America, nor children of “alien enemies in hostile occupation.” Accordingly, President Trump announced two new executive orders this week to counter what the court has wrought.
In his order “Continuing To Protect The Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,” President Trump clarified which categories of foreign nationals are to be denied birthplace citizenship consistent with the court’s ruling in Trump v. Barbara. The president ordered that birthplace citizenship not be recognized for children whose parents are alien enemies, including members of designated foreign terrorist organizations, which now includes multiple Latin American cartels. Nor is birthplace citizenship to be recognized for children of diplomatic personnel from foreign countries (defined clearly in the executive order). Lastly, birthplace citizenship is denied for those whose parents engaged in birth tourism.
In the other order, “Ending Birth Tourism,” President Trump explained how birth tourism is a form of immigration fraud because it involves dishonestly obtaining a temporary, nonimmigrant visa while actually aiming to drop an anchor baby and thereby “establish a permanent foothold in the United States by securing the advantage of citizenship for their children and then potentially for themselves.”
By its nature, birth tourism aims at acquiring permanent benefits which would normally have to be obtained through the path of an immigrant visa and eventually naturalization. There is no statute explicitly banning birth tourism, but the president is correct that birth tourism is already de facto illegal because it involves lying about the reason for entering the U.S. and likely involves committing other accompanying crimes, as the DOJ recently noted.
The president’s order instructs the Departments of State and Homeland Security to scrutinize visa applicants, prevent entry for foreign nationals who are engaged in birth tourism, and revoke visas from those who have engaged in such activity. Also, the DOJ has recently announced its intention of investigating and prosecuting those operating and profiting from illegal birth tourism schemes.
Departmentalism
In considering how to resist bad Supreme Court doctrines, it should be noted that former American presidents, relying on the tradition of departmentalism, were not so deferential to the Supreme Court’s interpretation on matters of constitutional interpretation. Famously, President Andrew Jackson rejected the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the constitutionality of a national bank (McCulloch v. Maryland, 1819), vetoing the attempted recharter of the bank in 1832. Similarly, President Lincoln rejected the Supreme Court’s interpretation about black citizenship in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and as president, his administration issued passports to free black Americans.
These are just a few examples. In line with this departmentalist logic, the strongest thing President Trump could do would be to publicly declare his repudiation of the court’s interpretation in Trump v. Barbara and instead announce his administration intends to only acknowledge citizenship in accordance with the outlines of his original executive order.
Admittedly, this would provoke outrage, not least from the judiciary. However, given that our judiciary repeatedly commits unconstitutional outrages of its own, and given that the anti-American, pro-criminal, open-borders left poses an existential threat to the survival of our American nation, I am not sure why the right should restrain itself from taking extraordinary steps to fight back.
Trump’s Strategy At Present
If such open resistance in the style of Jackson or Lincoln could be considered “hardcore” departmentalism, then Trump seems to be taking a more moderate, subtle form of departmentalism which still ultimately aims at indirectly resisting the court’s bad interpretation. The Trump administration is already aggressively pursuing a holistic remigration strategy by deporting illegal immigrants at record levels, terminating Temporary Protected Status, increasing denaturalizations, and slashing legal immigration through regulations. --->READ MORE HERE
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