When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June in favor of broad birthright citizenship protections for babies born in the United States, one of its most conservative justices warned that the decision could extend even to so-called birth tourists.

Women "who come here solely for the purpose of giving birth” would be able to secure automatic U.S. citizenship for their children, Justice Samuel Alito wrote in dissent from the 6-3 ruling, which blocked President Donald Trump’s first attempt to restrict birthright citizenship.

Undeterred by the ruling, Trump tried again Thursday, signing two executive orders largely targeting birth tourism. But that portion of his latest effort is almost certain to face legal challenges and could prove difficult to defend in court, legal experts said, because it targets a category of people they argue the Supreme Court has already addressed.

"These children are citizens based on their birth on U.S. soil,” said Amanda Frost, a University of Virginia law professor who studies birthright citizenship. "Illegal conduct by their parent can have no bearing on their status.”

Trump has for years sought to restrict birthright citizenship as part of his broader immigration agenda. On the first day of his second term in January 2025, he issued a sweeping executive order aimed at denying citizenship to children born in the United States to parents who were either in the country illegally or were present temporarily under lawful status, including those on work visas and international students.

The Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling, in a case known as Trump v. Barbara, rejected the administration’s attempt to enforce the policy nationwide, finding that it conflicted with the language of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment grants citizenship to people born in the United States who are "subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Trump’s latest orders seek to narrow that protection specifically in cases involving birth tourism.

One order directs federal agencies not to recognize a child’s U.S. citizenship if either parent is "engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship.”

A second seeks to restrict visas for foreign nationals suspected of traveling to the United States for the purpose of giving birth. It remained unclear how the measure would be enforced.

U.S. regulations already prohibit foreigners from using temporary visas specifically to obtain U.S. citizenship for a child. The new orders appear designed to strengthen enforcement of that restriction and further discourage birth tourism, but legal experts said the administration could face significant constitutional hurdles in doing so.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump renewed his criticism of the ruling and said "people are building businesses around” birth tourism, suggesting that "hundreds of thousands” are wrongly benefiting.

Some analyses cite smaller numbers, with Penn State University scholars estimating 5,000 to 10,000 births a year involving birth tourists between 2014 and 2024.

Besides birth tourism, Trump’s new directive also seeks to expand historical exceptions to automatic birthright citizenship, which include children of diplomatic representatives such as ambassadors and hostile foreign troops occupying U.S. territory. The order would widen the categories to include foreign government employees and those deemed foreign terrorists.

Scholars divided

Scholars were divided over whether courts might allow some of these expansions.

Expanding the category of diplomats is potentially legal, depending on how it is done, Frost said, "though that requires giving those people significant immunity from U.S. law.”

University of California, Berkeley, law professor John Yoo, who worked as a Justice Department official during Republican George W. Bush’s presidency, said the order’s attempt to define foreign enemy forces on U.S. soil as including terrorist organizations "will eventually pass constitutional muster.”

Others said certain expansions may stretch too far.

"Japanese immigrants to the U.S. were deemed enemy aliens during World War II,” said University of Michigan law professor Sam Erman. "Under the administration’s rule, their U.S.-born children could have been denied citizenship.”

The legality of the various provisions could also depend on how agencies implement them. Some of the terms are elastic, such as the definition of an "alien enemy” or the "purpose” of a stay, said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This creates "huge zones of discretion that allow officials of the U.S. government to deny visas or admission based on suspicions or a need to vet further,” Motomura said.

Court ruling

The Supreme Court in June struck down Trump’s prior order, even though the administration argued that automatic birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration and birth tourism.

"Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights, to freely participate in our political community,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote, adding that the authors of the 14th Amendment extended that promise to every free-born person in the land.

"We keep that promise today,” Roberts wrote.

Alito did not mince words in his dissent.

"In my judgment, the court has made a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future,” he wrote.

He faulted the court for ruling that "even a child born to a mother who is here for only a brief time is a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Such a view yields "grotesque results,” Alito said. "While foreigners who wish to immigrate lawfully must sometimes wait for many years, a child born here to a birth tourist is automatically a citizen,” he said.

White House aides defended the orders Thursday.

"There’s absolutely nothing in here that runs afoul of any of the Supreme Court’s opinions on the subject,” White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf said.

Yoo disagreed.

"I do not see any exception to birthright, as defined by the court in Barbara, that would include parents who fraudulently violated federal law to give birth to children on American territory,” he said.

Rachel Rosenbloom, an immigration law professor at Northeastern University, said she would be surprised if the order’s new exclusions survived a legal challenge, calling them "clearly unconstitutional.”

"This order seems like a desperate measure by a president who is having a hard time accepting that he just suffered a significant loss at the Supreme Court,” Rosenbloom said.