Trump Signed Two More Citizenship Orders. This Time He Aimed at the Part Almost Nobody Defends.

WASHINGTON — Five weeks after the Supreme Court struck down his 2025 executive order on birthright citizenship, President Trump signed two more.

The first, titled "Continuing to Protect the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship," directs agencies to treat children born in the United States to employees of foreign governments — embassy and consular staff and their households — as outside the automatic grant of citizenship. The second authorizes visa and entry restrictions aimed at commercial birth tourism, the industry that arranges travel to the United States for the purpose of delivering a child here.

Neither order has taken effect. Both will be challenged. The president described them as "adjustments" made necessary by the Court's refusal to green-light the original.

The reporting has largely treated this as the same fight resumed. It is not. The legal ground has been chosen much more carefully this time, and the difference is worth understanding before the next round of injunctions.

What the Court actually decided in June

The June ruling reaffirmed that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to persons born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction, and that a president cannot narrow that guarantee by decree. On the sweeping version of the 2025 order — which would have excluded the children of anyone unlawfully present or on a temporary visa — the outcome was never seriously in doubt.

But the Court did not hold that the jurisdiction clause is meaningless, and it could not have, because the leading precedent says otherwise.

United States v. Wong Kim Ark, decided in 1898 and the case that established the modern rule, expressly carved out the children of foreign diplomats. Diplomatic personnel are not subject to American jurisdiction in the relevant sense; they carry immunity from the courts that would enforce it. That exception has been federal practice for more than a century and appears in the State Department's own guidance.

Where the new order is strong and where it is not

The first order is an attempt to stand entirely inside that carve-out, and to the extent it does, it is on solid ground.

The vulnerability is scope. Accredited diplomats are already excluded and have been for decades — that part changes nothing. The order goes further, reaching "employees of foreign governments," a category that includes staff without full diplomatic immunity: locally engaged personnel, technical and administrative employees, drivers, and household workers. Those people generally are subject to American courts, which is precisely the test Wong Kim Ark applied. Drawn too broadly, the order loses on its own chosen authority.

The second order is on much stronger footing and has attracted much less attention, which is backwards.

It does not purport to strip anyone's citizenship. It restricts entry — a consular and visa function where executive discretion is at its widest, as the Court affirmed in Trump v. Hawaii. The State Department has denied B visas to applicants traveling primarily to give birth here since 2020, under a rule that survived challenge. Extending and formalizing that authority is a far more modest legal act than the headlines suggest, and it addresses a practice with essentially no constituency.

The practice itself

Birth tourism is a business. Agencies advertise packages — visa coaching, housing, a hospital, documentation — priced from roughly $20,000 to well past $80,000. Federal prosecutions in Southern California have described operations coaching clients on how to conceal pregnancy from consular officers and how to underpay hospitals by presenting as indigent.

That is not immigration. It is the sale of American citizenship by intermediaries who did not own it, to buyers who never intended to live here, and the child acquires a lifetime claim on this country by way of a transaction his parents completed with a travel agent.

There is no serious argument that the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to protect that arrangement. Its authors were writing about the freed slaves and their children — people who lived here, worked here and were owed a country. A statute closing the commercial version of the loophole could pass with votes from both parties, which is the strongest evidence that executive orders are the wrong instrument.

What's next

Expect suits within days and a preliminary injunction against the first order well before it is implemented. The second is a harder target and may survive largely intact.

The administration's calculation appears to be that losing narrowly is worth more than not litigating at all — that each round forces courts to say what the jurisdiction clause does mean, and that the answer will eventually be narrower than the one immigration advocates have been asserting. That is a long strategy. It is also the only one available while Congress declines to legislate.