The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, has said that the most expansive census-based estimate accounts for about 22,000 to 26,000 babies born in the US from birth tourism every year. Government data, according to the institute, showed that there were 9,600 births to mothers with foreign addresses in 2024.
“The idea (is) that people come here pretending to be a tourist, pretending to be a visitor,” Stephen Miller, homeland security advisor and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, said while standing beside the president on Thursday.
“But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, (to) leave our country and then have a US citizen child,” he said, adding that those children then gain access to welfare benefits, the voting booth, and “all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans”.
Miller said the president has the authority to ban birth tourism under a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which grants the president the power to set exceptions and limitations on who can enter into the country.
On one of his first back days in office in 2025, Trump signed an executive order that tried to end birthright citizenship as guaranteed in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution.
A legal battle brought the case to the Supreme Court, which in June ruled that Trump’s 2025 policies could not stand and birthright citizenship remained the law.
The decision was a major blow to Trump’s ongoing efforts to limit who can live, work, and become citizens in the US.
The high court made “a bad decision, very unfair decision”, Trump said from the Oval Office on Thursday while announcing the executive orders. “Our country suffers because of it, and we’re ending in a different way.”
Gabriel Chin, a professor at the University of California Davis’ School of Law, told the BBC that while parts of the order might hold up, other aspects “raise some serious constitutional questions”.
Chin said the president does have some power to restrict people coming into the US specifically for the purposes of having a child.
“But once it does happen, once a child is born in the United States, I don’t think the president has any power to decide that that child is not a citizen,” he said, adding that the issue was settled in the Trump administration’s recent loss in the Supreme Court.
He called birth tourism a “drop in the bucket” against the millions of births in the US.
“It’s an unusual phenomenon,” he said.
