President Donald J. Trump isn’t about to let a few unelected judges thwart the centerpiece of his illegal immigration agenda.
A little more than a month after the Supreme Court handed him a stinging defeat on birthright citizenship, the president signed a pair of executive orders seeking to work around the late June ruling.
Trump signed the new orders on Thursday in the Oval Office, with one increasing the number of people who would be ineligible to receive birthright citizenship and the other banning “birth tourism” in which pregnant foreign women come to the country specifically to drop their kid on the northern side of the border, making the child an automatic U.S. citizen.
.@POTUS: “We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright [citizenship]… so we’re making adjustments.”
President Trump is signing two Executive Orders to protect the meaning and value of American citizenship after Trump v. Barbara:
— The first… pic.twitter.com/NGSNNuzM0h
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 6, 2026
“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright,” Trump said. “It was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we’re making adjustments because it’s very unfair.”
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”
“This was done right after the Civil War,” the president said of the 14th Amendment which enshrines birthright citizenship in the U.S. Constitution. “This was for the babies of slaves, and what’s happening now? People are building businesses around it.”
“Signs and Billboards are being put up all over our Southern Border, and Mexico, advertising BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP, with ‘Deliveries starting at $4000.’ Likewise, similar signs going up all over our Country. Billions of Dollars will be illegally made by this SCAM, with Citizenship going to anyone willing to pay. It will be, by far, the number one way of becoming a citizen, and then the entire family will be allowed to follow,” Trump said in a July 8 post to Truth Social.
The president was joined by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the administration’s top illegal immigration hawk.
“As the president mentioned, the 14th Amendment was passed exclusively in the aftermath of the Civil War, so to ensure that the children of slaves would be citizens,” Miller said. “It had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that’s been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed.”
Trump’s orders were immediately condemned by the American Civil Liberties Union.
“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. Any executive order that tries to rewrite birthright citizenship will meet the same fate as the last one,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement.
“I think it will,” Trump said when asked if he believes that the orders will pass muster with the courts.
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