President Donald Trump plans to sign two executive orders on Thursday intended to deny birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. through "birth tourism," Axios reported. The orders also seek to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of certain foreign diplomatic staff and could potentially apply to U.S. territories in the future.
The White House schedule included an Oval Office "signing time" event on Thursday afternoon. As of 3:55 p.m., the event had not yet started, occurring approximately 55 minutes after the time originally listed on the official itinerary.
Currently, no federal law explicitly prohibits birth tourism, which refers to traveling to the United States for the purpose of giving birth so the child gains U.S. citizenship. However, a regulation implemented in 2020 during the first Trump administration bans the use of temporary tourist and business visas if the primary intent is to obtain citizenship for a newborn. Those involved in birth tourism schemes may face prosecution for fraud or related offenses.
There are no official government figures tracking how many foreign nationals travel to the U.S. specifically to give birth or what the associated cost to taxpayers might be. The Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for lower immigration levels, estimated in a 2020 analysis that approximately 20,000 to 25,000 mothers engaged in birth tourism during a one-year period between 2016 and 2017. For comparison, there were 3.6 million total births in the U.S. in 2025.
For those impacted, the concrete change would be the denial of U.S. citizenship for their newborns, who would instead carry the citizenship status of their parents' home country. This change would affect the child’s future legal rights, including eligibility for U.S. benefits, the ability to work in the U.S. without a visa, and the right to a U.S. passport. Parents and legal representatives would likely notice these changes immediately at the time of birth or when attempting to register the birth with U.S. authorities, though the source does not specify how existing birth registration procedures would be altered.
The move sets a potential precedent for executive action regarding the interpretation of the 14th Amendment's citizenship clause, which has historically been applied to grant citizenship to almost all children born on U.S. soil. Legal challenges regarding the president's authority to alter these standards via executive order rather than through Congress or a constitutional amendment are likely. What happens next depends on the formal signing of the orders, expected Thursday, followed by their publication and the inevitable judicial reviews that typically follow executive actions on immigration policy.