By Jonathan Stempel
Aug 11 (Reuters) – The ACLU and other groups asked a federal judge to block U.S. President Donald Trump from enforcing new executive orders to limit the number of people eligible for birthright citizenship.
In a Tuesday court filing, the groups called Trump’s orders an improper attempt to evade the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 rejection of his effort to end birthright citizenship for children whose parents were not American citizens or legal permanent residents, known as green card holders.
The Supreme Court said Trump’s original executive order, issued the day the Republican began his second White House term last year, violated the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment.
“Despite the Supreme Court’s clear direction, the President continues to claim for himself the power to identify categories of children whose citizenship he intends to deny,” the filing said. “The court should underscore that the government may not strip away class members’ citizenship through any executive orders or other similarly flawed assertions of executive power over birthright citizenship.”
The White House and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Limiting birthright citizenship has been a top priority in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Trump’s latest orders from August 6 take particular aim at “birth tourism,” in which women travel to the United States to give birth so their children can obtain automatic citizenship.
Citizenship would be denied to children whose parents work for foreign governments in the United States, engage in fraud to obtain citizenship, or are classified as “alien enemies.”
TRUMP CALLED BIRTH TOURISM A DISGRACE
Speaking in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump called the Supreme Court decision “very unfortunate” and said “people are building businesses around” birth tourism.
“It’s a disgrace,” Trump said. “They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”
Trump’s original executive order targeted immigrants in the country illegally or even temporarily, including students and people with work visas.
Tuesday’s filing in the federal court in Concord, New Hampshire, asks the presiding judge to clarify that Trump’s latest orders do not threaten the citizenship of children protected by an earlier injunction.
“President Trump may not like the fact that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right,” Cody Wofsy, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “That is really beside the point. It’s well past time for these illegal and cruel attacks on children’s citizenship to end.”
The Center for Immigration Studies, which supports less immigration, estimated in 2020 that between 20,000 and 26,000 mothers enter the country for “birth tourism” annually.
There were 3.61 million U.S. births in 2025, U.S. government data show.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rod Nickel)
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