US President Donald Trump has signed a fresh executive order aimed at restricting birthright citizenship, targeting people he claims enter the United States on tourist visas primarily to give birth.
Announcing the move at the White House on Thursday, Trump said the policy was intended to address what he described as abuse of the country’s citizenship laws.
“They’ve taken birthright citizenship, and they’ve made a joke out of it,” Trump told reporters, adding that the administration was making changes because the current system was “very unfair.”
The latest order follows a setback in late June when the US Supreme Court struck down an earlier attempt by Trump’s administration to limit birthright citizenship, a decision the president criticised as “very unfortunate.”
According to senior White House adviser Stephen Miller, the executive order also seeks to deny automatic US citizenship to children of members of foreign terrorist organisations and other individuals acting on behalf of foreign governments.
Miller said the measure would ensure that people who would otherwise have wrongly qualified for birthright citizenship would no longer be eligible.
The new order builds on a previous executive action that sought to end automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to parents living in the country illegally or holding temporary visas.
However, lower courts blocked that policy, ruling that the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment guarantees US citizenship to nearly everyone born on American soil.
The Supreme Court upheld that interpretation in a ruling written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by two conservative and three liberal justices.
The 14th Amendment states that all persons born or naturalised in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. Existing US immigration law already allows visa applications to be refused if officials believe an applicant’s primary purpose for travelling is to give birth in the country.
The Trump administration has argued that the amendment was originally intended to secure citizenship rights for formerly enslaved people after the Civil War and does not apply to children of undocumented migrants or temporary visitors.
The renewed effort is part of Trump’s broader anti-immigration agenda, which includes expanding deportations of undocumented migrants and ending deportation protections for nationals from several countries.
